Inode Preservation Possible?

[Neal Morgan]

Hi Julian and list!

I've been using MailScanner with ZMailer successfully for some time.
One thing I didn't like was the fact that there was a "disconnect" in
the logs (syslog, mail) between the message ID when received by SMTP,
handed off to MS, taken again by router/scheduler.  This made it very
difficult to diagnose problems with individual messages.

I'll try to keep the background info short.  Zmailer derives a message
ID from the inode and create date.  If I could keep the message in the
same/original file, the logging would stay correct from ZM to MS and
back.

I managed to build on the work of others (Carlos?), added some of my own
scripts to preserve the original inode through copying and cat'ing.  It
works but it's kind of ugly.

So, the question is, would it be possible to make MailScanner do this
for me?  In other words, don't delete the incoming file, instead copy it
to its work area, perform whatever changes are necessary, then put the
altered content BACK into the original file so the inode would be
preserved?   ...finally, and equally important, use a "mv" to put in the
outgoing folder rather than copying.

This isn't a high priority thing, more a feature request.


Many thanks,

Neal Morgan