[CentOS] The case of the missing mail
Anne Wilson
cannewilson at googlemail.com
Thu Dec 23 17:22:30 UTC 2010
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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