procmail
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Re: LASTFOLDER blues

2007-03-26 08:34:19
On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 10:16:01PM +0200, Dallman Ross wrote:
On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 08:17:12PM +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 07:24:14PM +0200, Dallman Ross wrote:

But anyway, Bart is right: if you're having filesystem troubles,
why does procmail have to become bloatware to be able to figure
that out?

Beacuse an MDA's rule #1 is to not lose mail under any
circumstances. As an exageration to illustrate the situation: Why
doesn't procmail nod off the calling process right from the start to
speed up processing then, if we don't want procmail to be liable at
all for lost mails?

It's really the top-most rule.

I agree in principle.  But there are limits to everything.
The debate is simply where that limit is.  What if I come
yank the power cord out of your machine right when procmail
is trying to save the message?

Yes, that's correct. No MSA/MTA/MDA will lose mail if you pull the
power cord by design.

This argument is not very convincing. Everything falls under the
admin's responsibility for one, and concerning procmail: If a
fatal error is found it does bounce back the mail, so why can't
this be done in this case, too?

What about quota problems?  Procmail doesn't know about quote or
save messages when we're over quota.  This question comes up on this
list about once a quarter at least.  Someone writes wondering why
the mail isn't being saved.  The stock answer is, "Are you running
postfix, and have you bothered to change the default quota from 50
MB?"

I don't see the problem - quota issues, filesystem full and bad fs
should be handled all the same: If the write fails, bounce the mail
back.

Sigh --- this solution is clear, I just don't want to double all my
recipes with more bloat :/

I agree in principle, again.  You do have an unusual situation, though.

It's not unusual to want to sleep safely at night knowing that mail
will be delivered safely or rejected properly.

(Can't you check file perms and ownership in a pre-check recipe in the
run?)

What use is this for a bad fs, an fs over quota, or a full fs? The
issues are not someone having wrongly set owner and file modes,
although you can add this under the category user-errors-that-
shouldn't-cause-mail-to-be-lost.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net

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