On 18 May 1999, Gjermund Sørseth <gjermund(_at_)nextel(_dot_)no> wrote:
This might not be direcrly related to your problem, but let me air a
similar procmail issue regarding dot-locking and the use of procmail
as the local delivery agent.
Consider how procmail dot-locks a mailbox - first it creates a file
with a unique name, something like /var/mail/_QVETS. Then it tries
to hardlink /var/mail/user.lock to this file. If the user.lock file
already exists (because the user is already receiving some mail), then
procmail unlinks the temporary file, sleeps for 8 seconds and tries
again.
Now consider what happens if someone mailbombs a user by sending him,
for example, 1500 mails in a very short time (a regular occurence
these days, if you ask the postmasters of large mailservers).
[...]
Normally your MTA should take care of that situation. If there's no
way to configure it to do that, you should probably consider switching
to a better / more modern MTA.
Regards,
Liviu Daia
--
Dr. Liviu Daia e-mail: Liviu(_dot_)Daia(_at_)imar(_dot_)ro
Institute of Mathematics web page: http://www.imar.ro/~daia
of the Romanian Academy PGP key: http://www.imar.ro/~daia/daia.asc