Bug 18547

Dear RedHat,

i moved to RedHat linux on a pentium in april ....... almost immediately i
noticed that outgoing mail cc'd to myself was going missing ...... all the
logs swear blind that the messages were delivered as required ...........
except that they weren't ..... evidence of other incoming mail being lost
surfaces from time to time

i use the plain old vanilla 'mail' program ....... and i keep any undeleted
and unsaved messages in the spool file 

i have detected on a few occasions that outgoing mail has been lost too

there have been several occasions when an incoming message has arrived
twice (....... a whole lot better than not at all i freely admit)

recently colleagues have noticed similar problems with mail going missing

this morning i caught it in the act ....... the final crunch so to speak:

i opened mail as usual, and saw that an incoming message had been truncated
part way through a line ....... and the next message started right there
..... i.e. in column four of a line

clearly there is some fault in the mutual exclusion mechanism for access to
the mail spool ...... at least when the network and mixed architectures are
involved

as befits a mutual exclusion fault, it is intermittent and not easily
reproducible .... sigh

exactly where it is i have no idea ........ all i want is for plain vanilla
mail to work as advertised

regards,

richard.

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