Subject: Moving mail to ~user/mbox first goes to /var/mail/user?

From: Todd Piket <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 16:23:38 -0400

Hello,

We have been having problems with NULL characters in the body of 
messages at our site.  We first suspected procmail, but determined that 
was not the culprit.  Upon further analysis we found that when a user 
moves and/or copies a message from a folder to his/her INBOX the message 
first goes to the MAILSPOOL (sysinbox) and then is retrieved from there 
and placed in mbox.  This would normally not be a problem, but it would 
appear that the server is introducing the null characters when it writes 
to the MAILSPOOL (/var/mail/user) for a reason I can't seem to determine.

Things of note:

1.)  /var/mail is NFS mounted (I know, I'm a bad person).
2.)  This move operation does not dot lock the /var/mail/user file as a 
normal "snarf" does.
3.)  The null characters are introduced even if procmail is not 
delivering mail concurrently.

Any ideas or workarounds?  We are looking at Courier and maildir because 
our site is fairly big and we need NFS, but we need to work around this 
problem for the time being.  Any suggestions would be helpful.

Further notes:  All users go to email.mtu.edu which is load balanced 
through an F5 BigIP to one of 4 UW IMAP servers that NFS mount the 
MAILSPOOL and user home directories.

-- 
Regards,

  ------------------------------------------------------------
| Todd Piket                        | Email: [email-masked]    |
| Programmer/Analyst                | Phone: (906) 487-1720  |
| Distributed Computing Services    |                        |
| Michigan Technological University |                        |
  ------------------------------------------------------------

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 13:42:10 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)

> 2.)  This move operation does not dot lock the /var/mail/user file as a 

What is doing this "moving"?  It's not c-client, since c-client always 
dotlocks.

> Any ideas or workarounds?  We are looking at Courier and maildir

Courier is not an IMAP-compliant server.  If you must go to maildir, look 
at Dovecot instead.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.