[CentOS] The case of the missing mail

Thu Dec 23 17:22:30 UTC 2010
Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com>

On Thursday 23 December 2010 16:53:22 Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 3:03 AM, Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com> 
wrote:
> > All the recipes work perfectly - it's just those that fall off the end.
> > For some reason it overrides the DEFAULT setting in procmailrc.
> 
> I'm seeing messages from you about this on the procmail list as well
> so pardon me if I've got my threads confused, but did you indicate
> this has been happening some of the time for several days before you
> noticed it?  

From the dates of messages I found in /var/mail/anne, it began on the day I 
left for a short vacation.  Consequently it was 5 or 6 days before I noticed.  
Few message fail the procmail recipes, normally, so I don't expect to see many 
there.

> Have you determined that it's consistent for any message
> that "falls off the end" or is it intermittent?
> 
I found that yesterday morning at 6 am messages were being delivered 
correctly, including a couple that "fell off the end".  Suddenly though, 
things changed.  In the logs I saw messages about by-passing a lock file.  I'm 
wondering if some of the longer html messages are causing locks to be set that 
don't expire in time for the next message.  I do remember in the past using 
the setting for No Lock (and yes, I read the warning), but can't remember 
where I found that.  I'll think more about that.

> If its consistent and there's a reasonably well-defined time that it
> started happening, you should be looking for changes to the system
> such as an automatically-applied update that occurred shortly before
> the symptoms began.  However ...
> 
> Earlier in this thread you said MAILDIR=/home/anne/Maildir/ ... but
> MAILDIR is procmail's equivalent of the shell's PWD, it has nothing to
> do with delivery except as the path prefix if you use a relative path
> name in a delivering recipe.  Assigning to MAILDIR is just a "cd".
> 
> Have you tried DEFAULT=/home/anne/Maildir/ ?
> 
No, I haven't touch the settings, because they have worked well for several 
years.

> > This is a recent
> > development, and in the log I see LASTFOLDER - is it possible that
> > DEFAULT is no longer read and I need to define LASTFOLDER?
> 
> LASTFOLDER is informational, procmail sets it immediately before
> delivering to that folder; if you see LASTFOLDER in your logs, the
> only way the message should fail to arrive in that folder is in the
> event of an error writing to that folder.
> 
They do arrive there - it just defines it as /var/mail/anne, which is useless 
on my IMAP server. 

> I don't recall whether setting DEFAULT to a pipe (e.g., to
> delivermail) is supposed to work, but I wouldn't rely upon it.  In
> some simple tests I tried, the pipe was never opened and the mail was
> passed through to standard output.  Setting DEFAULT to a file or
> directory worked.
> 
In fact I misquoted when I first wrote.  The line I gave is correct, but it 
should have been followed by
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/new/

In fact my logs show no mail going to /var/mail/anne today, so I will have to 
watch and wait.  I repeat, I'm using a procmailrc that has worked perfectly 
for years.

> If you haven't already, you really should add
> 
> LOGABSTRACT=all
> VERBOSE=yes
> 
When I first set this up it was with a printed set of documentation.  I do 
have VERBOSE=YES, but I have LOGABSTRACT=YES.  Are these equivalents or has 
something changed in the meantime?  Not that I'm worried about that - I 
repeat, everything has been fine up to now.

> to your procmailrc until you have resolved the problem.  This isn't a
> guarantee that you'll be able to track it down but it'll help
> eliminate a lot of possibilities.

I've not had a single message to my Inbox today, but nor have any ended in the 
Local mail account, so I'll just have to wait to see whether the problem 
recurs.

Anne
-- 
KDE Community Working Group
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