[7143] in Athena Bugs
rt 7.2R: rmail.el or movemail (emacs)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Feb 19 19:56:07 1991
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 91 19:55:44 -0500
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: qjb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: bugs[7090]
There is always going to be an unavoidable race condition between
when emacs actually loads the file into an emacs buffer and when it
deletes the mail from the disk.
Emacs does the best it can to deal with this problem by not deleting
the file containing the mail from the disk until after the mail text
has been inserted into the rmail buffer.
What this means is that if you hit ^G after the movemail has
finished getting mail from your post office, but before emacs inserts
the text of the mail into the rmail buffer, the mail still exists in a
file in your home directory (from rmail.el, I conclude that this file
should be called "po:qjb~").
Therefore, you haven't lost the mail. It's still in "po:qjb~".
I don't think emacs can do any better than this, within the
constraints of what ^G is supposed to do, so I don't think this is a
bug.
Jonathan Kamens
Project Athena Quality Assurance
Reference:
From: qjb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 91 00:22:41 -0500
System name: m16-034-9
Type and version: RTPC-ROMPC 7.2R
Display type: apa16
What were you trying to do?
Get my mail
What's wrong:
I hit CTRL-G while it was getting mail and lost all my
new mail.
What should have happened:
Rmail should not remove mail from the postoffice until
it has verified that the mail has been safely written to
the user's rmail file.
