Re: Archive One Message Behind Using -add

[Don <unixsysadm@yahoo.com>]

--- Earl Hood <ehood@hydra.acs.uci.edu> wrote:
> On February 5, 2002 at 10:19, Don wrote:
> 
> > I'm attemting to keep an archive automatically up to date using
> > a .forward file.  When I use the -add option, the archive is always
> > one e-mail behind.  ie, If the mail box has 4 messages, only 3 will
> > display on MHonArc.  When message #5 comes in, MHonArc will display
> > 4 messages.  If I remove the -add option, which has the effect of
> > rebuilding the entire archive, the archive is kept up to date.  This
> > works for now, but as archives get very large this would of course be
> > problematic.  Any Ideas?
> 
> My initial hunch tells me it may have to do with the mechanics on how
> sendmail is invoking things.  Does sendmail invoke each forward
> component in sequence (and if so, what is the order), or in parallel?
> If there is some parallelization, there could be race conditions
> between when sendmail appends beta's spool file to when mhonarc (via
> webnewmail) reads the spool file.
> 
> If sequence, it is possible that sendmail calls "|./webnewmail"
> first before appending to beta's spool file.
> 
> You could easily do some tests to find out what is going on by
> replacing webnewmail with a simple program (like cat) that just
> dumps the contents /var/mail/beta to some temp file.  Then
> you can examine the temp file to see if the new message actually
> exists or not.
> 

I had actually tested that possibility with a ksh and in fact it
did execute the ksh script before the email landed in the spool file.
What was confusing is that it would work without the -add.

> > .forward file: \beta, "|./webnewmail"
> > 
> > Snippet of ./webnewmail:
> > @ARGV = ("-quiet",
> >          "-rcfile",
> >          "$MRC/date_p_beta.mrc",
> >          "-rcfile",
> >          "$MRC/indice.mrc",
> >          "-title",
> >          "Project Beta Date Index (by reverse date)",
> >          "-ttitle",
> >          "Project Beta Thread Index (by reverse date)",
> >          "-sort",
> >          "-reverse",
> >          "-treverse",
> >          "/var/mail/beta",
> >          "-outdir",
> >          "/export/home/beta",
> >          "/var/mail/beta");
> 
> With what you have, using webnemail in the .forward is useless.  I.e.
> The .forward file tells sendmail to pipe a copy of the message to
> webnewmail, but the @ARGV settings is telling mhonarc to read from the
> spool area.  I.e.  Standard input of webnemail (which contains a copy
> of the new message) is being ignored.  Hence, you are relying on
> sendmail to append the new message to /var/mail/beta before
> webnewmail is called.

arrgh.  You're right.  I'd gotten sloppy switching between a 
manual add and an 'automatic' add script.  Thanks. That fixed it.

> 
> With what you have, it is probably better to use a cron job, which I
> generally advocate.  With cron, you can managing load better and deal
> with problems better.

I hear 'ya.  However when trying to give a demo an instant update sells
better than "and in just a minute you'll see the message converted".

Thanks for your help.  It's fixed.  Very impressive software BTW -
Thanks!


Don


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