[Dovecot] Corrupt mbox folders after migration from uw-imap

[Magnus Stenman]

Frank Cusack wrote:
> On September 13, 2006 12:39:39 AM +0200 Magnus Stenman <stone at hkust.se> 
> wrote:
>> Ian Mortimer wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 19:40 +0200, Magnus Stenman wrote:
>>>> I usually just delete the extra line in vi.
>>>
>>> That sounds slightly dangerous.  Do you lock the Inbox while your
>>> doing that?
>>
>> no.  vi will warn me if the file has changed since reading it, that is 
>> good enough for me
> 
> So "almost no protection" against corruption is "good enough" for you, 
> then?

yes.

Since this happens on low volume mailboxes maybe every 2 months I don't 
worry about that tiny window.

If I feel paranoid, I run a tail|grep on the maillog and make sure no 
mail is being recieved for that user.


> 
> Assuming no NFS (in which case the problem is worse), the vim warning is
> only useful if mail is delivered while you edit.  You can still be writing
> out the file and then have a new mail be delivered before your vim write
> is complete.  (or if vim uses a tmp file and does an atomic rename, you
> can lose mail instead of corrupting the mbox)
> 
> -frank