At 17:08 2003-05-02 -0400, Raven did say:
I'm pretty sure that the mail folder is on a different filesystem than my
INBOX, but we did check my personal quota's (where the mail folder files
reside) and there is lots of space.
'pretty sure' is helpful when diagnosing problems like this. How about you
verify 'for sure'?
Also, "checking quotas" and "checking available space" are two very
different things. You could have lots of quota and virtually no available
space.
'df' at a shell prompt would suffice. No need to relate all of the results
to us here, just note where mount points are and verify where you're
writing stuff.
I cannot tell what version of Postfix is being run from mail headers, it
just says '(Postfix)', I will try to find out from my sysadmin.
'telnet your-mailhost 25'
The greeting might tell you, though some admins/developers believe
"security by obscurity" is a legit security model, and omit versions from
greetings, believing that'll spare them being attacked by some scriptkiddie
based on the knowledge that some particular release is subject to a certain
exploit.
Doesn't postfix report a version number if you invoke the program
locally? Surely the manpages for it can tell you how to retrieve version
and configuration data?
> >I have 2-3 other rules in my .procmailrc that are almost exactly the
> same,but they continue to work.
>
> Because, lemme guess, they write to a different mailbox file.
Yep.
Wow, I'm like, psychic. Is it a different path by any chance? Like, say,
something that might be in a different mount?
The only difference I can see is that the destination mail folder is much
larger than my other mail folders.
-rw------- 1 raven 15 66503480 May 2 14:16 acr
That's swift - your sysadm doesn't have a proper group name assigned to
your GID? It makes me wonder what other loose ends there may be.
I do not believe this file is corrupt and the permissions are the same as
all my other mail folders (which procmail can write to). Pine still seems
to be able to extract mail messages from it with no problem.
Ok, let rephrase: do any of the disk partitions have LESS _available_ space
than the size of this mailbox? If somewhere in the processing (because,
uh, you haven't provided your rcfile, so I don't know what you're doing
exactly) a COPY is made of this file, you could run out of space. It may
not be in the same dir/mount as it is currently - some temporary copies are
made to other locations such as /tmp/.
Of course, procmail simply appends new content onto a file (it would be
terribly inefficient to copy), but MUAs can do all sorts of weird things to
manage a file, and some POP daemons are known to make copies of files, and
message deletions pose issues (gap editing is most efficient, but for some
apps, spooling out all the messages to retain to a separate file is how
they do it), so there exists the possibility that _at_the_moment_ procmail
is attempting to write to the file, available disk space is lower than it
is when you're checking space and scratching your head.
The only thing I have heard so far is a rumour that Postfix may have
problems with very large mailboxes.
There's been mention of this by other people. I've personally seen system
mailbox sizes in excess of 850MB under _sendmail_, and procmail handing
mailboxes as large as about oh, 1.6GB, throughout which I've never seem
procmail exibit any delivery issues.
Have you tried to see if procmail exhibits the problem when run manually?
_move_ your mailspool, or otherwise save some messages from it to another
file (messages which should be saved to this mailbox you're having trouble
with). Then:
formail -s procmail < that_moved_file
Which should re-process the messages through your procmailrc, but this
time, without whatever process limitations Postfix may be enforcing when
procmail is invoked _by_postfix_. If delivery this way works as expected,
then your config problem is in postfix, and you should promptly go hound
the postfix users forums for assistance.
So what I have done, is disabled this rule and re-created it, having the
e-mail now being appended to a new mail folder. And voila it works!
Er, "new mail folder" may be on a separate partition mount where there's
more disk space? Or is is a new mail FILE in the _same_ directory?
Just to clarify, does procmail actually do the writing to mail folders or
does Postfix?
As the LDA, procmail is.
Raven.
Some cultures have the most fascinating given names. I got stuck with a
boring one, but I continue to use it to sign my correspondance anyway.
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
_______________________________________________
procmail mailing list
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail