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From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Elm 2.3 bug (?) loading in freshly arrived mail.
Message-ID: <1990Jun4.164924.27800@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 4 Jun 90 16:49:24 GMT
References: <399@gagme.chi.il.us>
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 22

In article <399@gagme.chi.il.us> greg@gagme.chi.il.us (Gregory Gulik) writes:

>I've had this happen to me several times since I installed 2.3,
>but it's just now starting to get annoying.  This is on a 3B2
>running System V 3.2.

>It seem to happen when I'm already in elm, and new mail arrives.

>Reading message: 2
>newmbox - length of mbox. != spool mailbox length!!
>Write to temp file failed, exiting leaving mailbox intact!

This will also happen if your mailbox happens to have any null characters
embedded in it (and yes, mailers do exist that know how to attach and
detach binary files so it may not be an error to have null characters
in the mailbox).
This is a side effect of comparing the length obtained from stat()ing
the spool mail file with a length obtained by fgets()/strlen() during
the copy to the tmp file.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us