On Thu, Sep 23, 1999 at 03:56:29PM -0700, jello@waste.org wrote:
> I tried out 2.3.18ac7, and experienced repeated mailbox corruption, until
> I switched back to 2.2.12. I'm running a Debian potato system, and I get
> my mail via fetchmail, and read it w/ pine. Attached is a snippet of my
> mailbox showing what would happen (it was always the same string of
> characters. I haven't seen any corruption outside of various mailboxes. I
> have an SMP P2 box with 2 SCSI HDs on an onboard adaptec 2940. All the
> corruption was on the IBM disk (the other is mounted read-only). Please
> let me know if you need more info (although I am a little nervous about
> trying another kernel that might corrupt more mailboxes, as you might
> imagine) Thanks.
I had some problems like that with 2.3.18ac6 or ac7 but my changes
weren't isolated to just the kernel so I couldn't isolate any single
culprit during the timeframe. I haven't seen the same problem when I
reverted back to 2.2.13pre9 and now 2.2.13pre11.
In my particular case, I pull email via fetchmail, it gets fed into
sendmail, and sendmail uses procmail to deliver it locally (and stuff
it into my various mailboxes using my .procmailrc). I read with mutt.
I wasn't seeing garbage, but I was seeing truncated email that was
obviously missing the message body and only had enough of the header to
make it into my mailbox.
My original thought was that maybe it was a file-locking error. In
that case, I would tend to rule out fetchmail (which seems fairly serial
and only has to deal with itself, in 5-minute intervals in my case so
it is unlikely to be fighting itself). Sendmail might be able to barf
on the body and keep everything else intact (different files, delivery
addresses passed via SMTP or command-line and not in the message body)
but it is pretty fixed. Between sendmail and procmail, however, you
might manage enough delay to pile a few pieces of email on top of each
other due to local delay (anti-spam DNS lookup, whatever).
In my case, I didn't have enough of the email to get the message ID
and try to track it down through sendmail and see if it seemed short
before it handed it off to procmail for delivery.
--x+6KMIRAuhnl3hBn
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPfreeware 5.0i for non-commercial use
MessageID: 3WRYD1myIdQXIGTyBdR+hR9t0y+zzcHG
iQA/AwUBN+tn6G/ftxGdcmZ0EQJjjgCghqEv+5g6+qcFUlc3Z8dCpNkrWa0An104
mRbH9lDA3DOpKrbz86lGvthu
=jUCF
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--x+6KMIRAuhnl3hBn--
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