On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 02:58:58PM +0000, Chris Green wrote: > > > > What I want to know is:- > > > > Is it possible for a message to be delivered into an mbox that mutt > > is looking at without provoking the ""Mailbox was externally > > modified" message? > > > > If the above is possible then what does the delivering MTA have to > > do so that the delivered message is 'N' and all others are left > > unchanged? > > > I just took a look at the code (desperate measures!) and it gives me the > answer. > > If the mbox in question has a message *appended* to it then mutt regards > this as OK and will not output the error. It detects an append by > looking to see if the 'message separator' before the appended message is > exactly where the end-of-file was previously. > > I suspect my MTA doesn't agree exactly with mutt about where the > 'message separator' is. > > I need to play some more! :-) > I have found my problem!
My (python) MTA puts a blank line at the start of each message before the "From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Mar 20 14:27:05 2013" line which is the mbox start line. As described above mutt sees the start as being at the "From " so it thinks the mbox has been modified otherwise than by a simple append. I guess something must have changed in the python libraries (or maybe in mutt) to have changed this logic because, as I said, it did used to work OK. I'll just have to fiddle something somewhere. I can probably remove the empty line in my python code. -- Chris Green
