Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!udel!princeton!twg.com!david From: david@twg.com (David S. Herron) Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386 Subject: Re: Mail problem under SCO UNIX V/386 Release 3.2 -- Loss of Mail Message-ID: <7743@gollum.twg.com> Date: 13 Aug 90 05:40:55 GMT References: <21@happym.wa.com> <17@raysnec.UUCP> Reply-To: david@twg.com (David S. Herron) Distribution: na Organization: The Wollongong Group, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 38 In article <17@raysnec.UUCP> shwake@raysnec.UUCP (Ray Shwake) writes: >irv@happym.wa.com (Irving Wolfe) writes: > >>If two messages arrive from another system in the same uucp session for a user >>while he is in mail, one of the messages can get lost. The uucp logs on both >>ends show successful passing of both pieces of mail, but the user is only >>notified of the first piece and the second piece goes to never-never-land (at >>least sometimes). As as been said before ... this is *NOT* a problem except in the configuration you run. MMDF, as do all other mail systems, puts out a lock on the mailbox wile delivering mail. The lock is there so that you don't have >= two processes scribbling on the file and making a mess of things. Now .. at some point, before I got involved with MMDF, a decision was made that the local channel will simply exit when it see's the mailbox is locked (and exit in a way which tells the deliver controlling it that there's a temporary problem, rather than a permanent problem for which it should bounce the mail back to the sender) Part of this decision was an assumption that the system had a deliver running in the background controlling mail traffic on one-or-more channels. The command line to do this is: deliver -cchan,chan,chan -b (for instance): deliver -cuucp,local,list -b I have no idea why a simple heuristic wasn't used to, when the open+lock failed, simply wait a little while and try again. It's something I plan to do with the version of MMDF which I maintain. I have no idea what SCO plans to do with the version of MMDF they maintain ... -- <- David Herron, an MMDF weenie, <- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <- <- Sign me up for one "I survived Jaka's Story" T-shirt!