-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday, Aug 21, 2003, at 09:07 US/Eastern, Dave Richardson - Lists wrote: > Q: Any harm in leaving qmail/vpopmail up and running while working at > the file system level to move the messages out of the Maildir tree? > I DO NOT want to risk damaging this account, since it's my real Admin > account.
don't ever touch anything in a "tmp" directory unless no mail-related software is running- no qmail-send, no IMAP or POP3 server (i.e. the machine is in single-user mode.) any files you find in a "tmp" directory are half-written messages which are in the process of being delivered to the maildir. once the file is totally written it is then renamed into the "new" directory, where it is available "all at once". (other mail systems occasionally run into issues when they try to read a message while it's being delivered- using maildirs immediately does away with that issue.) other than that it shouldn't be "dangerous", although it's not the best idea in the world. if you write the script as a cron job once a minute you're introducing the risk of a race condition (the message may make it to your email program before the cron job fires.) and if you try to improve your odds in the race by running in a loop and checking every five seconds, you're still keeping the CPU busy and there's no guarantee you're going to win the race for any given message. a better solution would be to use maildrop or procmail or something similar to filter the message on its way into the maildir. this way if a message comes in that you want to save elsewhere, it gets saved there directly and never touches your real mailbox at all- no need to worry about timing. maildrop knows how to handle maildirs, i'm not sure if procmail does or not. - ----------------------------------------------- | John Simpson - KG4ZOW - Programmer at Large | | <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.jms1.net/ | - ----------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.2 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBP0TXRBAfUXMzBvz7EQLiDgCgzIylE9woB64eJ96s7/g4ydgIDZYAoPLU Eq0JL5w8QDtAP/wf97fxmyNw =93rZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
