On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Tim Tyler wrote:
> Qpopper experts,
>     We recently installed qpopper 4.03 back in December.  Since then we have
> had 4 occurrances where their mailbox in /var/spool/mail became corrupt for
> some reason.  We have configured qpopper to write the temporary pop file to
> a different directory structure (/var/spool/pop).  Given that we have 1500
> active users, it seems to be working for the most part.  But occassionally
> some users with a quite a few megabytes of email will find that when they
> have their client configured to leave on server, their temporary pop file
> can't get written back to the mailbox file properly.  This has only happened
> 4 times now, but it is raising a red flag for me.  Something is corrupting
> the mailbox file because if I 'vi' into the mailbox and resave (w!) the
> file, the file becomes approximately 1/10 of its original size.  Its as
> though the file thinks its much larger than it really is.  This is an
> obvious corruption, but I don't know why.  It also appears to be a small
> subset of the temp pop file which remains in the /var/spool/pop directory.
>   What might cause the mailbox file to become corrupted when the temp pop
> file tries to write itself back to the mailbox file?  Is there a compile
> option that I might consider to minimize corruption?
>   Note: we do use a quota, but not all incidences exceeded the quota.  Also,
> we never had this problem with the old qpopper 2.0.

Well, I wouldn't call myself an expert but we encountered similar
problems.  I believe the problems might involve a mismatch of mailbox
locking between your MTA and qpopper.  In our case, I was able to install
the mail locking header files under our Linux distribution (Debian),
re-compile, and re-install qpopper.  It seems to work so far.

-- 
Roy Bixler
The University of Chicago Press
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to