[sylpheed:36055] File locking

Celejar celejar at gmail.com
Thu Apr 24 02:51:57 JST 2014


Hi,

First, thanks Hiro and everyone else involved with Sylph for a great
MUA; I've been using it for years and am very happy with it.

A serious problem: I use getmail to download mail from a bunch of POP
accounts (gmail, gmx, zoho, yahoo, etc.) into a traditional *nix mbox
spool file (/var/spool/mail/username), and Sylpheed is set to
incorporate mail from the spool file once a minute. Occasionally, the
spool file becomes corrupted (a bunch of null bytes preceding the
mail). The only two programs on my system that touch the spool, AFAIK,
are getmail and Sylpheed (there's no MTA on the system - outgoing mail
is passed off by Sylph to the various relay servers run by the
respective mail providers).

I discussed the problem with Charles Cazabon, the getmail dev, and he
asserts that the problem stems from incompatible file locking between
the various programs writing to the spool:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.mail.getmail.user/5072

I have been unable to find documentation of what method Sylpheed uses,
or whether this is configurable. Can anyone shed light on this? Am I
doing something wrong to begin with here? [I know some people recommend
against using mbox at all these days, and that there are other ways of
handling the getmail / Sylpheed interaction.]

Celejar


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