Problem with Fedora1 and ipop3d

[Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 05:15:43PM -0700, Tim Alberts wrote:

> I am left with 2 questions:
> 1. Why is imapd/ipop3d telling me to set access to 777 on /var/spool/mail?
 It should be 1777 (see STICKY DIRECTORIES, in man chmod).

> 2. Why is email randomly dissappearing?

I doubt that mail is disappearing, it is being moved.... ;-)

I suspect that mail is being moved to the local system.  For example
exchange can be setup to leave mail on the server or download it for
local (faster) access.  People that access a mail box from multiple
systems have to be carefully that mail does not get downloaded to the
'other system'.

Local mode Pine will do the same thing if the file 'mbox' is present.
Mutt and Pine can confuse... a user.  Pine will drain all mail into
'mbox' if mbox exists.  Mutt will only put seen mail in 'mbox' and you
have to change to '>' to see it.

Evolution, netscape, and other mail tools will also do equivalent
things to make remote mail boxes act local.  One of the things
that the pine style of tools does is add a 'meta' message in the
mail box.  "Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE..."
In this meta message there is an X-IMAP: line and a Status: lines
that helps imap/pine keep track where it is and what it is doing.
This include the necessary tokens for interlocks to avoid corrupting 
the mail file.   Since pine comes with an imapd that grocks pine
style X-IMAP lines make sure you know which imapd is active.
(locate imapd).   It is possible to have two, three, more... ;-)



-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
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