sendmail - kmail - lockfile ?

John Walsh dear_grommet at hotmail.com
Mon May 31 11:34:37 UTC 2004


Hi,

I have a question, see below, which someone was helping me with,
but their answer does not really cover what I want to know, because
they say they don't know how kmail works.

Anyone have a real/better/full answer to my question ?

Which is, in short :- what locking method should I use for Kmail to read a
local mbox file that sendmail is delivering to ?


Extract from below:

>I can't say how Kmail works. It should handle that case proper as long
>as there is a setup option to get the user's mail by accessing the mbox.
>You should not care about anything with that.

Yes, Kmail has an option to read 'local mbox' accounts - but you have to
select the locking method for it - which one should I be using ?

Thanks,
John.


> > = Me (John)
>= reply

> > According to sendmail doc, only if .procmailrc file exists will sendmail
> > deliver to procmail. I don't have any .procmailrc files, so I assume
> > procmail is not used. However, even if it was used, then as there are
> > no recipies to catch any emails, then they will all go to the default
> > spool file anyway.
>
>In any way there must be an LDA configured in sendmail.mc. By default on
>Redhat and Fedora systems that is Procmail. It can be a different
>program as well, like Maildrop or the Cyrus deliver. Again, Sendmail
>does not store any message itself. That does the LDA (local delivery
>agent).
>
>If you use no /etc/procmailrc or ~.procmailrc then you use no filtering,
>sorting or whatever is possible using Procmail. but Procmail is invoked
>to store the message in the mail spool.
>
> > So the point is that all mail goes into a file:/var/spool/mail/USER
>
>Right.
>
> > I am only talking about 1 machine, my server.
> > It runs sendmail... which delivers incoming emails to local disk file
> > /var/spool/mail/USER.
> > I am asking about a local user, who uses Kmail to access the same
> > local disk file:/var/spool/mail/USER on the same machine.
>
> > My understanding (expectation) is that if I have 2 applications reading
> > and writing to the same file on the same machine (same fs/disk), then
> > they should use some locking system - to stop them both accessing it
> > at the same time.
>
>That is correct and the case.
>
> > OK, only sendmail is writing to the file, but Kmail will remove it - so 
>we
> > should avoid conflicts ?
>
>Procmail is writing and Kmail want to have full access, ok.
>
> > So I hope that is a clear explanation of why I am asking:
> >
> > What locking method should I use ?
>
>I can't say how Kmail works. It should handle that case proper as long
>as there is a setup option to get the user's mail by accessing the mbox.
>You should not care about anything with that.
>
> > If the answer really is 'none', I'd be very surprised - but I'll trust 
>your
> > answer if thats the case.
>
>You would only have to care if you intend to write your own mail client
>;)
>
> > I don't see how IMAP/POP are relevent in my situation - its all on a 
>local
> > fs/disk, so I don't think I'm running IMAP or POP (don't even know what
> > IMAP is).
>
>Even if you receive the mail by Sendmail on the same machine where you
>use Kmail you can use an IMAP/POP3 server. I just suggested that as it
>sounded to me as if you would get errors when using Kmail. Something
>like "cannot access because the file is locked". Then I would guess
>Kmail does not handle the situation proper and you should switch to an
>IMAP/POP3 server and setup Kmail to no access the mbox file but the
>IMAP/POP3 server.
>
> > If I want to read mail from an outside source, I'll use (and have done) 
>POP,
> > and that works fine.
>
>Ok, you could do that on the same machine as well.

_________________________________________________________________
Use MSN Messenger to send music and pics to your friends 
http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger





More information about the fedora-list mailing list