losing mail by stopping mailscanner ?

[Julian Field]

At 12:54 30/12/2002, you wrote:
>    while upgrading to mailscanner 4.10-1 i encountered a problem that might
>cause loss of mail.
>Mailscanner placed several incoming messages in its ../incoming/${PID}/
>directories, but was shutdown before a delivery attempt could be made.
>After restarting mailscanner those directories aren't checked for unprocessed
>messages and will probably be removed by some errant "clenup" script.
>Is there a way to avoid those directories getting abandoned?

These directories can quite safely be abandoned and deleted. No message is
deleted from the incoming queue until the new version has been placed in
the outgoing queue. So no messages can be lost from this happening at all.
If a message is being processed at the point where MailScanner is killed,
then that message will be processed again from scratch when MailScanner
next starts up. You're safe, don't worry.

>One other less severe thing came up:
>    running mailsanner under an id other than root (or the owner of the
>installation directory / config files) causes mailscanner to fail, as it
>opens the files  in "+<" mode. This means changing the open mode (which will
>perhaps counter some intended effects (locking?)) or making the directories
>writeable to the userid mailscanner is using at runtime.
>I would consider this at least a misfeature.

Fixed in the next release, which is due very shortly.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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