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List:       kmail-devel
Subject:    Re: How to make KMail play nice with mutt and procmail
From:       Michael =?iso-8859-1?q?H=E4ckel?= <haeckel () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-02-02 8:16:29
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On Freitag, 1. Februar 2002 22:21, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I just had a nice idea.
>
> AFAIK we currently only store the mtime of the mailbox files in the
> index files. This seems to cause problems with mutt as it doesn't
> change the mtime for some reason.

According to Dirk's comments it seems that it even has a reason for that. It 
abuses the modified timestamp to determine if there are new mails or not 
instead of treating it as any other application treats any other file.

> Maybe we should also store the size of the mailbox file. If mutt changes
> the file it's size will almost certainly change (and if it doesn't
> change then the change which mutt made is most likely no problem).

Well, this is something that works nearly always but not 100% reliable.

> If we detect a change then we must of course recreate the index. But we
> could try to do this without loosing the message flags by "merging" the
> old index and the new index, i.e. by copying all message flags from the
> old index to the new index (we should have enough information to
> identify corresponding messages in both indeces).

I don't think that we have. Anyway I still think, we should somehow write the 
status back in the mbox files.

> If we implement this we would finally solve all problems with the
> interoperability of KMail with mutt, procmail and possible other KMail
> clients running on a different machine but accessing the same mailbox
> files over NFS.
> What would be the best locking method? procmail lockfile or mutt
> dotlock?

These locking methods all have the problem, that they leave stale lock files, 
if KMail crashes, therefore we probably have to use FCNTL which however 
doesn't work on NFS. It should be checked, how mutt and pine do that.

Regards,
Michael Häckel
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