Re: Qmail, mailbox locking and the FSSTND

[Jeff Noxon <jeff@xyzzy.mrsa.com>]

There are dot-locking patches available for qmail.  I think you can find
them at www.qmail.org.  If you can't find them, ask on the mailing list
and I am sure someone will help you.

I've been running qmail for quite some time without reasonable locking, but
now that mutt supports maildir, I'm switching to that.  There are other issues
wrt qmail and mbox files, though...  i.e., it breaks a few things:

  - /etc/aliases doesn't work.  Solution: use qmsmac?

  - default pop daemons don't work.  Solution: use djb's pop daemon?
    I don't like his pop daemon because it doesn't support mbox, though.

  - When you log in, you don't find out if you have new mail or not.
    I have written a package called "mailcheck" that does this and other
    things.  It's packaged for debian but I haven't released it.  Would
    you like to test it out for me?  It supports mbox, mdir, and multiple
    mailboxes via global and local configuration files.

  - You no longer get new mail notification from the shell.  Solution:
    don't use mdir.  <sigh>

One possibility, although incredibly ugly, is to use a delivery agent
outside qmail to deliver to /var/spool/mail.

> So it looks like qmail will have to learn to do dot-locking. The only
> problem is, I'm not really sure how to do dot-locking properly. (I could
> always try a guess... but I don't think the people using my package would
> like that.) So could somehow either give me a snippet of code that does
> dot-locking or point me to an application that is known to do dot-locking
> properly? Qmail does all its locking through the following three
> functions: 

Thanks,

Jeff