Paranoid (over?)reaction to kmail glitch and exim security announcement
Hello folks,
Has anybody else experienced any difficulty deleting emails in the last
couple of days? Apart from the usual reluctance to lose any of the
wisdom and wit, I mean? ;)
I use kmail on woody. All my list mail (five or six lists, including
d-user, d-curiosa and d-devel) goes into an Mbox folder called linbox.
No other mail goes there. Two nights ago I downloaded a little over two
hundred messages (thank you) but found myself unable to delete or move
any of them. Attempting either led to a segmentation fault (or at least
I think that's what it was - SIGSEGV or something - I forgot to write
it down). Kmail had to be closed each time. Mail could be copied to
other folders, but not deleted or moved. The other folders were fine,
only linbox was behaving like this. I switch my computer off overnight,
but the reboot didn't help.
I set up a new folder (lintemp), then from the command line copied
everything from linbox into it. The new folder worked fine. So now I
emptied and removed linbox, then set it up again and copied all the
lintemp mail across to linbox from the command line. And now I found
nothing would delete again: trying to delete or move anything in linbox
again caused the aforementioned crash.
It wasn't hard to work around, of course, and I just put it down as a
wierd glitch: until I finally got around to reading the mail and
discovered a security announcement concerning exim: two possible remote
buffer-overflows. I did the apt-get upgrade, but despite not being able
to find any evidence of a problem I find myself unnerved by the
coincidence. I worry (possibly through ignorance) that the folder might
have been broken by an attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities.
So, has anybody else experienced similar problems in the last couple of
days? I expect not, but it would help put my mind at rest if nobody
else has - I can't be the only one running kmail who downloaded lots of
mail before performing the exim update.
Sorry about the length of this message.
Cheers,
Geoff
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