Re: curious about some implementation issues
> That's only true of messages stored in mbox and MH format mailboxes.
> Maildir mailboxes store that information in the name of the message
> file.
Yes, I was talking only about mbox files. Good point.
> In the case of mbox, the mailbox is locked using the dot-lock program.
> The exact method used depends on the filesystem... the fastest method is
> an fcntl lock, but NFS sometimes doesn't have a functional lock
> protocol, so dot-lock files are created. You can read a more detailed
> explanation of what goes on in general on Wikipedia:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox
Cool. The only thing I don't understand is that it seems that all file
locking in Unix is "advisory" and it's totally up to the program
accessing the file whether to respect it or not. Is that true?