[Pine-info] (no subject)

[Eduardo Chappa]

*** Pierre Frenkiel (bapierre.frenkiel at apc.univ-paris7.fr.comm) wrote in...:


:) I recently installed gnubiff, with which you call check mail remotely,

:) using imap or pop. It works perfectly, but now, when I open pine

:) to read new mail, I get after 1 or 2 minutes the following messages:

:) in pine:

:)     [MAIL FOLDER "INBOX" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR]

:) and in the mail server log file:

:)     imapd[24913]: Killed (lost mailbox lock)


That means that the mail check program is not doing its work properly. 
When you open a connection to a mail server you have the choice of how you 
want to check for new mail in a folder.

When you open a folder to read it and do modification in it, like you are 
doing right now, you SELECT the folder. Depending on the storage system 
used in the server, this may cause you to loose the lock on the folder. 
Your mail check program is doing a SELECT on the folder. This is bad, not 
only for the reason you point out, which you would not see if the storage 
system was different, but because if you select a folder twice then new 
messages become unseen and not new in the next session, and that defeats 
the whole purpose of checking for new mail.

The correct way to check for  new mail in IMAP is to do a STATUS command. 
A STATUS command opens the folder in read only mode, which means that no 
modifications will be done to the folder. New messages will remain new 
after the folder is closed. A session holding a lock of a folder does not 
lose its lock because of a STATUS command.

My suggestion is that you use a better program to check your e-mail. Try 
to see if the mailutil program (distributed in the same source code with 
Pine) can be plugged to the program you are using to check for new mail.

-- 
Eduardo
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