[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Now that we've established that a risk exists we can ask the question,
> how big is it? For many people, the risk is small enough and the cost if
> it occurs is bearable. For others, perhaps those who receive mail more
> often (thereby increasing the risk) or those who use a lot of sequences
> (thereby increasing the cost on failure), it is not a good choice.
I don't think anyone, most especially Richard Coleman, meant to deny that
the risk is there. Your risk assessment is excellent with only one point
missing.
Most people (?) who use procmail do NOT deliver all their mail into a
single folder. That, of course, means that we're not talking about ONE
unseen sequence that is being hit from all sides but rather some number of
sequences.
The fact that we're talking about multiple separate sequence files reduces
the risk and reduces the cost of loss. In order for a specific sequence
file to become corrupted it's necessary for mail to be delivered into that
folder at the same time as one is altering the sequences in it (more on
that in a moment). This is less likely to occur than the same event with
a single folder and a single sequence. And the cost is less because loss
would only affect that one folder. However, as you stated, use of sequences
to contain important information may increase your "cost".
Another factor affecting this is the mail reader you use and how it
interacts with the stored sequences. I use exmh for 90% of my email and
exmh doesn't rewrite the sequences after every mail item but only when I
either commit changes or change to a different folder (more details I
don't recall). This reduces the window of failure to those points where
I'm doing those two actions.
-Hal <*>
