Re: converting from qpopper

[Sam Roberts]

How do MTAs usually deliver mail to the local spool on reception via
smtp?

Do they refuse to accept mail for a locked mailbox, with a temporary
smtp error code? If so the sender will try again later, hopefully the
mailbox will be unlocked then.

Certainly they should wait for the lock, shouldn't they? I'd think the
Right Way would be to for MTAs to accept mail via smtp to be deliverd
locally, queue it, then whenever the queue processing occurs move
the queued-for-local mail into the spoolfile IFF only a lock can be
achieved.

So, what about real life? What really happens? Don't they have some
kind of way of dealing with a locked spool?

Sam

Quoting Sergey Poznyakoff <address@hidden>, who wrote:
> >           else if (newsize < mailbox_size) /* FIXME: Should it be a != ? */
> > 
> > We are trying to be smart by guessing that if the newsize is larger,
> > it is because a new mail was ___APPENDED___ to the mailbox so the offsets
> > maintained by the mailbox_t will still be sane and mailbox_expunge ()
> > will do the right thing (i.e. seeing that they was new mail when doing
> > the ftruncate()).
> > 
> > I do not remember the rationale behind this but it was a long exchange
> > between sergey.
> > I do not particularly like it and would prefer that if the mailbox lock
> > was not respected to bailout immediately without being smart.  
> 
> The main rationale was that if pop3d had bailed out at any change in
> mailbox size, the pop session would break at every new message
> arrived, which would make pop3d almost unusable for someone
> with heavy loaded mailbox. The situation gets even worse if we take
> into account that RFC forbids an implementation to flush changes
> until the user issues QUIT command. If we accept this behaviour
> any changes the user might have done to his mailbox will be
> lost with the arrival of the new message. And if we imagine
> someone with, say, 200 messages in his mailbox, it is quite
> possible he would never get a chance to delete any of them :^)
> 
> -Sergey
> 
> 
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-- 
Sam Roberts <address@hidden> (Vivez sans temps mort!)