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. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. R.H.Banach, X TEL: (+44) 161-275 5720 Department of Computer Science, | \ Internal: 5720 (Luddite mail users division) University of Manchester, Pm | \ P FAX: (+44) 161-275 6236 Oxford Road, | \ Manchester, v v http://www.cs.man.ac.uk M13 9PL, Cat<----M---->B homepage .../~banach U.K. Fm K EMAIL: banach.ac.uk -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
following the total collapse of the email system in the department, and the subsequent adoption of a different file locking strategy by the system management team, the anomalous behaviour of email in the department seems to have vanished (thankfully) this bug is therefore withdrawn richard.