On 10/04/2010 02:07 PM, Bron Gondwana wrote:
Keep going and remove entires for messages with IO errors reading their file, or bail and make the administrator fix the underlying permissions first? I can see arguments for both - though remember that once you've removed the index record you can never go back under strict UID existence semantics, so if the admin fixes the files later then reconstruct will actually give them new UIDs.
Definitely bail. It's too easy to miss things like this when lots of characters are being piped to the screen, resulting in mail being silently "lost". I recently had a user complain about missing sent messages from 2004. He was working on a project that went on hold for a very long time, but now needed to be revisited. I checked the backups and his 2004 sent mail has been gone for at least 5 years (as far back as my backups went). This didn't prevent him from throwing a fit about "unreliable" systems.
