mailbox locking in debian

[Loic Prylli <lprylli@mygale.org>]

Hello,

I have seen that smail use "file locking" to lock a user mailbox while
manipulating it (it creates a /var/spool/mail/<user>.lock file), like
I suppose most others mail programs in debian.

But a least the mail program from the mailx package do locking by
calls to flock. I am not sure, if in some (rare) cases, this could
lead to mailbox corruption or loss of messages.

So what is the proper way to lock a user mailbox ?

By the way, the tkmail program seems unable to lock it, it tries to
create a "<user>.lock" file but has not enough permission to do it.



Loic Prylli


P.S: here the version of the package I use:
mailx-8.5.5-1
tkmail-4.0beta7-1
smail-3.1.29.1-23 


--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org . Trouble? e-mail to Bruce@Pixar.com