[Ifile-discuss] Re: Maildir format

[clemens fischer]

"William E. Kempf" <address@hidden>:

> What assumptions have I made?  Who's talking about mail "arriving"?  What
> are you talking about?

sorry, i keep forgetting that you want to modify messages in place.
my instincts tell me this is not good, but the maildir format should
be able to handle it, since it provides unique filenames.  the only
thing one should take care about is proper locking out later scripts
that think the rewriting hasn't taken place yet and start doing it
themselves.  this looses maildirs advantage of not requiring any
locking protocol.  of course, if rewriting is initiated rarely by the
user, and never before previous rewriting has finished, no locking may
be needed.

> I'm aware of all of this, but the headers inspected should *not* be
> limited by this RFC for many reasons.  First, not all mailing lists
> properly obey the RFC.  Second, the same script should be able to
> handle filing messages from my wife in a specific folder as well.

the many mailinglists not obeying that RFC were the reason i inserted
the awk script early in mail-processing.  it compares the address
lists in To: and Cc: to a list of posting addresses users are
subscribed to and inserts a normalized mailinglist header.  as i'm the
only user, it works for me.

> Locking should be the only real issue.  And to work with procmail,
> I'd assume it has to already do the proper locking?

i don't think so.  procmail ignores locking on program-deliveries, for
good reasons:  it cannot know if those programs are well behaved.  it
does locking only for final deliveries into files.

  clemens