Re: [tlug] Re: Mutt complaining of a read-only mailspool

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2002 at 12:04:28AM +0000, big0 quoth, and most verily thus:
> >Things were working smoothly until Mutt all of a sudden started
> >complaining that my "inbox" (i.e. ~/mail/inbox ->
> >/var/spool/mail/jmglov) was read-only when I tried to delete stuff.
> >This is not true, as the permissions show. Moreover, procmail is
> >having no trouble delivering mail to +inbox.
> 
> http://rute.sourceforge.net/node23.html#SECTION002390000000000000000 
> 
> See what kind of locking do mutt. I think it is with creating 
> /var/spool/mail/jmglov.lock file, so it is nothing to do with jmglov file
> permitions. 

According to the documentation I found, Mutt opens the file in question, then calls flock(2) on the file descriptor. flock(2) attaches a POSIX lock on the file (see the man page for details). If the flock() fails (i.e. the return value is not 0), Mutt declares the file readonly.

I solved the problem by removing ~/mail/inbox, which was just a symlink to /var/spool/mail/jmglov and then recreating it with touch. Since procmail uses +inbox as its default, I did not care whether +inbox was the system mail spool or a file in my home directory.

As for what could have caused the problem, Scott Robbins suggested that maybe I had emerged something while reading mail? (We both use Gentoo.) Indeed I had, but it turned out that he had seen this cause a problem only on maildir style mailboxes. I use mbox, so that probably ain't it.

In a later mail, however, he clued me into what was really going on, I think. In messing around with Procmail (which I am still learning), I switched from :0: to just :0 several times. According to Scott, the trailing colon affects how Procmail locks a file? Unless I misunderstood him, this is likely what caused my problem.

Thanks all for your help.

-- 
Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>

Associate Systems Administrator
INCOGEN, Inc.