On 2026-01-29 12:06:36 -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > On Thu, Jan 29, 2026 at 03:46:43AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > Easily-corruptible: If the tools handle it correctly, it should not > > be corrupt (it is probably less risky than the other methods). > > Unfortuantely, this is false. If the tool were in the middle of > making an update to the content-length, or the actual content, and you > had a power failure, hardware failure, etc.,
Well, such failures are rare and would have to occur at the wrong time. > then your whole mailbox from that message on is completely useless, > because the algorithm will never find the next message where it is > supposed to. But that's detectable by the user. I can see 2 possible contexts: 1. The user was copying a mail to some mbox file. If this cannot be completed due to some failure, the user would detect that because this occurs interactively. 2. This occurs with an incoming mailbox. So this is new mail, and the user will be able to detect that when reading mail. Moreover, in case of such a failure, a lockfile would remain. So it will not be possible to open the mailbox until the user removes the lockfile, which is an indication of failure: the user should guess that something may be wrong with the mailbox. BTW, I would definitely not recommend to use the mbox format for incoming mailboxes. This just leaves case (1). -- Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
