On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 02:19:36PM -0400, Homer Wilson Smith wrote:
> However we are running qpopper 2.52 and procmail 1.13.1 both
> of which I understand are old. Linux 2.0.38
qpopper 2.52 is way old, and you should definitely upgrade. There are
serious bugs in there, I believe including buffer overflows on your
system.
I can't advise too much on procmail versions, but we have been running
3.14 for about a year with no problems.
> We have never gotten corrupted mail within the mailbox,
> it is always at the top of the mailbox, first mail in it. Most
> usually it is a single blank line that merely needs to be erased.
> But sometimes for a large binary it just starts in the middle
> of the binary and we have to delete it.
...
> Users are not running shell just some popper client, often
> reading mail every 10 minutes. They get a large binary and wham
> it goes in bad and they can't get their mail from there on out.
> It happens about once a month on 2500 users.
>
> I been thinking of how to kludge this with a monitor on the popper
> log files, it sees the "can't read from lines" message and goes and fixes
> the mail file itself as best it can.
>
> I know I should upgrade to 4.03, but the number of bugs
> being reported here is scary.
Yes, but none of the bugs here are on the scale of mail being corrupted
like this, except when doing concurrrent shell access to the spool. If
you don't want to upgrade to 4.0.3, then at least go to qpopper 3.12.
> This is a production system and
> we need mail to work perfectly. :)
Sure, I understand that. If it's any comfort, we did extensive testing
here before upgrading from 3.x to 4.0.2, including having our tech
support group spend several days doing our own compatibility testing on
19 combinations of popular clients and access methods, including
covering PC, Mac, and Webmail clients, and dial-up and LAN access;
these got tested on empty, 10MB, and 110MB mailboxes, and each
combination got tested both with the "leave mail on server" and
"download everything" type configurations. The only bugs that came up
during this (besides the human error of editing the mailbox without
locking it) were fixed in 4.0.3, and the only one that really affected
users was the relatively obscure one of empty passwords on certain
clients causing a timeout.
We're not at all casual about mail either.
> No insult at all intended,
> I LOVE popper and procmail and linux and everyone who has helped
> bring all this about, I am but a worm in the scheme of things. But
> my customers none the less hate mail problems. Since this is the
> ONLY problem we are having, I would rather kludge a fix rather than
> upgrade to a whole new unknown bad of tricks.
IMHO, what you've got is a bigger problem than anything you will see
with either 4.0.3 or 3.12; and if you're running in server mode and
concerned about performance, you definitely want to go to 4.x. Your
hard disks will love you.
-- Clifton, zealous convert
--
Clifton Royston -- LavaNet Systems Architect -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWJD? "JWRTFM!" - Scott Dorsey (kludge) "JWG" - Eddie Aikau
