Re: Archive One Message Behind Using -add

[Earl Hood <ehood@hydra.acs.uci.edu>]

On February 7, 2002 at 15:33, Don wrote:

> > 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.

Could be a race condition.  If the call to webnewmail is a forked
sub-process, then the addition to the beta spool file could
be happening in parallel.  If this is the case, the -add causes
mhonarc to run much faster over the spool file since it will skip
already archived messages.  Without the add, it is reconverting
every message, making the processing of the spool file slower and
potentially giving time to sendmail to perform the append operation
before mhonarc gets to the end of the file.

--ewh