errors & procmail locking

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> wrote:

>Thus all messages to users should have an X-Bogosity line in the
>headers.  When I turn off procmail locking (using ":0fw" rather than
>":0fw:" before running bogofilter), I have seen occasional messages
>without X-Bogosity lines and can find corresponding "rescue" messages in
>/var/log/procmail.

You cannot lock pipes. I suppose the reason is something
else. I have never seen those problems. Maybe procmails
notes some probems of the programs you use in the pipe.

>> Bogofilter is supposed to wait, rather than quit, in case of locking
>> trouble.
>
>Correct, and it looks like that may not be happening :-(.

If procmail cannot lock, it does not have to rescue.
Rescuing happens if some program fails. Let's look at some
example: For muliparts I call a perl script to remove junk
(reduce alternatives, delete v-cards etc.). This script can
fail for huge mails. In this case procmail will rescue the
data (happens once a year or so;-).

>> > pi suggests that, procmail might have had a problem writing to
>> > /var/spool/mail/bogofilter.  I don't think that's what happened as
>> > file/var/spool/mail/bogofilter is only used for messages from the
>> > bogofilter mailing lists.  I think the "Error while writing ..."
>> > message just includes the first word of the command in "Executing
>> > ...".
>> 
>> Of course, it writes a pipe.

Then this is not a locking problem. If you want to lock
those kind of things you need to do manual locking.
http://piology.org/.procmailrc.html has examples.

pi