John Summerfied writes:
>Edmund R. MacKenty wrote:
>> The original UNIX mailbox is a single file, and the local mail delivery
>> agent locks the file, appends the new message, then sets the last-access
>> time back to whatever it had been before and unlocks it. The last-modified
>> time is thus later than the last-access time. I know this technique,
>> because I've written such delivery agents.
>It happens that I have mutt trained on an mbox atm.
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ stat $MAIL
> File: `/var/spool/mail/summer'
> Size: 106111492 Blocks: 207480 IO Block: 4096 regular file
>Device: fd00h/64768d Inode: 6309524 Links: 1
>Access: (0600/-rw-------) Uid: ( 1001/ summer) Gid: ( 12/ mail)
>Access: 2005-11-01 16:37:28.222756163 +0800
>Modify: 2005-11-01 16:31:41.206703875 +0800
>Change: 2005-11-01 16:31:41.206703875 +0800
I would guess that your mail system isn't using the old UNIX mbox
technique. I guess I should have said that "some" local mail delivery
agents use this technique, not "many". I still use SendMail, and here's
the stats on my mailbox:
File: "/var/mail/mack"
Size: 3942374 Blocks: 7712 Regular File
Access: (0660/-rw-rw----) Uid: ( 500/ mack) Gid: ( 12/ mail)
Device: 301 Inode: 1750 Links: 1
Access: Mon Oct 31 20:02:35 2005
Modify: Tue Nov 1 09:56:18 2005
Change: Tue Nov 1 09:56:18 2005
The fact that your mail system has created a special mail message that acts
as a meta-data container tells me that it is using some other method. It's
a good thing that mail delivery agents are moving away from the last-access
time hack, because it really is a hack.
>I know that, but this doesn't sound right. I have the RFC before me, and
>I've used the protcol myself from time to time, when writing a POP3
>client myself, using telnet to check mail boxes and (sometimes) to
>delete email, and debugging problems with fetchmail.
>
>I don't see anything in the protocol that requires, or even allows, a
>client access to the file's times.
>
>I'm reading rfc1939.txt which is part of the cyrus imapd distribution.
>(cyrus-sasl-devel package!).
There's nothing in the POP or IMAP protocols about this, because it is a
feature of local mail delivery, something those protocols do not address.
The POP or IMAP server is free to do whatever is necessary to interface
with the local mail system; those protocols are defining the wire traffic,
not the mail spool. It looks like your local delivery agent and mail
client have a better way of solving the new mail notification problem than
mine do. I'm using a a different mail environment, so I have to be aware
of this hack.
- MacK.
-----
Edmund R. MacKenty
Software Architect
Rocket Software, Inc.
Newton, MA USA
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