[CentOS] The case of the missing mail

Anne Wilson cannewilson at googlemail.com
Fri Dec 24 12:06:03 UTC 2010


On Thursday 23 December 2010 18:40:43 Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com> 
wrote:
> > On Thursday 23 December 2010 16:53:22 Bart Schaefer wrote:
> >> 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.
> 
> Sure, but the point is that assigning to LASTFOLDER yourself is
> meaningless.
> 
> Procmail will fall back on the folder named in $ORGMAIL in the event
> that it is unable to deliver to $DEFAULT, for example because of a
> locking issue.  It's quite likely that this assignment to LASTFOLDER
> is coming from ORGMAIL.
> 
Hmm - "echo $ORGMAIL" returns nothing.

> > In fact I misquoted when I first wrote.  The line I gave is correct, but
> > it should have been followed by
> > DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/new/
> 
> I'm pretty sure that's wrong.  From the procmailrc manual:
> 
>        If the mailbox name ends in "/", then this directory
>        is presumed to be a maildir folder; i.e.,  procmail  will  deliver 
> the message  to  a  file  in a subdirectory named "tmp" and rename it to
> be inside a subdirectory named "new".
> 
> So you should not have the "new/" on the end of the DEFAULT value
> unless you want a folder that is *named* "new" (and thus file paths
> ending in new/new/ and new/cur/ etc.)
> 
To be honest I was surprised to see it there.  I didn't remember putting it 
in.  The fact that mail is significantly down due to the holiday season makes 
testing difficult, but I'll experiment with that when things get back to 
normal.

> > 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.
> 
> Unfortunately that it "worked" doesn't always mean that it is correct,
> it just means you haven't hit the corner cases before.
> 
> >> 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?
> 
> Again from the manual pages:
> 
>        LOGABSTRACT Just before procmail exits  it  logs  an  abstract  of 
> the delivered message in $LOGFILE showing the `From ' and `Subject:'
> fields of the header, what folder it finally went to
>                    and  how  long (in bytes) the message was.  By setting
> this variable to `no',  generation  of  this  abstract  is  sup- pressed. 
>  If  you  set  it  to `all', procmail will log an abstract for every
> successful  delivering  recipe  it  pro- cesses.
> 
> So "all" includes some cases that "yes" does not, particularly copies
> made with the "c" flag on recipes.

I can see that could be useful at times.  Currently I don't have any "c" flag 
recipes, although I have used them from time to time.

Thanks for your patient help.  We probably can't do any more for a few days, 
until things get back to normal, but so far I've had no more messages in 
/var/mail/anne.  Since pebcak is always a high possibility, I confess that 
whenever I read config files I tend to tidy up unwanted spaces, etc.  It's 
just possible that I edited the recipes just before going away and 
accidentally inserted something that would interfere - such as a "." in front 
of the DEFAULT line, which I might not notice, but which would get cleaned up 
as an unwanted space, next time I read.  My eyes are not brilliant these days, 
so I'd not discount the possibility.

Anyway, thanks again.  I'll let you know if I discover anything more.

Anne
-- 
KDE Community Working Group
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