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Problem Understood: Re: Procmail recipe problems



On Mar 08 2007, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 09:37:50AM -0800, Arlie Stephens wrote:
> > On Mar 08 2007, S Scharf wrote:
> > > 
> > > On 3/8/07, Arlie Stephens <arlie@worldash.org> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >The recipe that *usually* works, indented here for convenient reading.
> > > >
> > > >    # Debian User List
> > > >    :0H:
> > > >    * ^(To|Cc):.*debian-user
> > > >    -debian-user
> > > >
> > > Does running procmail with the VERBOSE flag reveal anything?

> you can set a logfile and verbosity
> 
> VERBOSE=on
> LOGILE=...
> 
> in .procmailrc.

Well, I did a bunch of experimenting, and found that previously
misfiled messages were always filed correctly in a test setup, 
and the LOGFILE revealed nothing untoward - in the test setup.

Finally I decided to risk an overflowing logfile or real life mail
delivery problem, and turned on verbose on the live procmailrc. 
Lo and behold ..

    procmail: Match on "^(To|Cc):.*debian-user"
    procmail: Locking "-debian-user.lock"
    procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER=-debian-user"
    procmail: Opening "-debian-user"
    procmail: Acquiring kernel-lock
    procmail: Error while writing to "-debian-user"
    procmail: Truncated file to former size
    procmail: Unlocking "-debian-user.lock"

    procmail: No match on "^(To|Cc):.*gtu-list"
    ...

    procmail: Locking "-other.lock"
    procmail: [29292] Fri Mar  9 10:27:33 2007
    procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER=-other"
    procmail: Opening "-other"
    procmail: Acquiring kernel-lock
    procmail: Unlocking "-other.lock"
    procmail: Notified comsat: "arlie@740838:/home/arlie/Mail/-other"

In other words, the recipe is correct, but procmail can't deliver to
the mailbox file, and goes on to try other recipes. Why?

    $ ll Mail/-deb*
    -rw-------  1 arlie arlie 52796850 Mar  9 10:27 Mail/-debian-user

It appears that _mutt_ can add more messages to this file - when I save
them manually from Mail/-other - but procmail objects to its length. 

The problem's been intermittent because I occassionally find time to
read a few messages - or delete uninteresting threads en masse. But
since I'm not keeping up with incoming - not in general - I have a
problem.

I've temporarily "solved" this by 
     $mv Mail/-debian-user Mail/-debian-user2
but it obviously won't stay solved. 

I suppose the next thing to do is to find out whether the limit is
configurable - or write a cron job to rotate and retire incoming
mailboxes for my high volume lists, since I'm obviously not managing
to clean out uninteresting threads manually, fast enough to be
useful. 

-- 
Arlie

(Arlie Stephens	                              arlie@worldash.org)



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