[Dovecot] Re: 0.99.10.5 release candidate

[Brian Candler]

On Mon, May 31, 2004 at 07:24:41PM +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> >   -ERR This message has been deleted by someone else!
> > 
> > or something like that. I can live with that.
> 
> That's what Dovecot does now.
> 
> But that isn't the worst if you have no locks at all. You still want to
> lock the mailbox while it's being read or written, otherwise there would
> be either mailbox corruption (two writers at the same time) or user
> could be sent corrupted mails (one reading while another is writing).

Oh yes, sorry. I now think "Maildir" exclusively, and forget that some
people still use mbox :-)

Having seen mailservers where users leave 10-20MB of mail on the server, in
a single mbox file, where the POP3 server has to read through the whole mbox
every time they login just to count how many messages are in there... well,
that's enough for me to give up on mbox.

> I think nfs.lockd does pretty much that, except the client OS must
> notify if process dies without releasing lock. If the whole computer
> gets lost, .. I guess the lock stays there for a long time?

If it were over TCP, you could turn on keepalives I guess.

Cheers,

Brian.