[dovecot] Re: mbox support

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 07:54:41PM +0200, Marcus Rueckert wrote:
> could you explain the following sentence from the readme.txt:
> "mbox support is available but currently it relies a little bit on good
> luck, ..."
> 
> what kind of luck do i need?
> why do you think the mbox support isnt this reliable?

mbox files are locked only while they're being modified. If only dovecot was
accessing the mailbox I guess there wouldn't be any problem since it
properly locks the index files as well. But if any other MUA was just
modifying the mbox file (deleting messages) while dovecot was reading it,
it's possible that you end up having data from some random message. Storing
MD5 sum of all messages and making sure they match would fix this.