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Re: another silly question



On 2005-05-07 22:12:21 -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
> You cut off part of that... There was a bit about reading mail in a
> group.

Do you mean several users reading the same mailbox? This is rare and
I'd never recommend that; in particular, the read status is shared,
which makes no sense. Instead, you should use either aliases / mailing
lists to send the mail to each user or a local news server.

> As others have pointed out, it is also not so uncommon for users to
> read mail with more than one MUA. Sometimes I do this, when I have
> to read my mail from a machine that doesn't have mutt installed...
> mail(x) doesn't understand maildir. That makes it a bit tough to do,
> if I have mail in maildir format, n'est pas?

mail(x) doesn't understand MIME either. Non-English messages will be
very difficult to read, if not impossible. Some users with stupid MUA
even encode all their messages (even English ones) in base64; mail(x)
won't help there.

> I don't doubt it...  But on modern unix systems, the likelihood of
> that happening is pretty low.  Most vendors have NFS locking fixed,
> and on local filesystems it just shouldn't be an issue.  If you're
> experiencing mbox corruption today, the problem is probably
> application-specific bugs, not OS locking problems...

There are both problems. Mailbox corruptions (in fact this was due to
a bug in Mutt dotlocking detection at configure time, still not fixed
AFAIK) and locking problems due to NFS (the problem disappeared only
after a reboot of the NFS server).

> [Which isn't to say I think it's a good idea to keep mail on NFS
> dirs...  But locking isn't the only reason for that.]

There are some places where you don't have the choice.

> > Also, some messages get corrupted when they are stored in a mbox
> > mailbox, due to the "From " problem. In fact, this is a sufficient
> > condition for not using mbox at all.
> 
> There's no good reason for this to occur.  I've been using mbox for
> years without ever seeing that problem.  If you're seeing it, again,
> your MUA (or possibly MDA or MTA, or the sender's) sucks... it's not
> an inherent mbox problem.

Yes, it *is* a mbox problem. This is the mbox format that requires ">"
(or whatever) to be added (by the MDA or the MUA), as not all software
knows the Content-Length header (if you want compatibility with
anything...).

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA