Procmail Lockfile

[Lin Jianfong]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 03:56:21PM -0500, Gardner Bell wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm trying to setup procmail to deliver my mail but I continuously receive the following errors in my log file.
> procmail: Locking ~/Mail/Lists/FreeBSD-Questions.lock
> procmail: Error while writing to "~/Mail/Lists/_YmHxxx.gardnerbell.ca"
> I do receive my mail but it always ends up in the default location that I have specified.
> 
> In my .procmailrc file I have the following environment variables: 
> MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail
> DEFAULT=$HOME/Mail/received
> PMDIR=$HOME/.procmailrc
> LISTFOLDER=$HOME/Mail/Lists
> SENDMAIL=/usr/sbin/sendmail
> 
> This is the recipe that fails to acquire a lock
> :0:
> * ^(From|To).*freebsd.org
> ~/Mail/Lists/FreeBSD-Questions
> 
> The permissions on my Mail and Lists directory are set to drwx------
> Any help to resolve this is appreciated.
> 
> TIA
> 
> Gardner Bell
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This would be a "me too" reply. I have similar setup as the one you have and
I notice the failure of procmail acquiring lock whenever there are too many
messages (more than 5k) in my "freebsd-questions" mail folder (mbox format).
I'm also subscribed to freebsd-current, freebsd-stable and a host of other
lists, but it only happens to me so far on freebsd-questions (highest volume
list). The only work around is to keep the number of messages hovering below
5k or so. I suspect this is an obscure bug with procmail handling high volume
mboxes.

Maybe using mail folder instead of mbox will help, but I have not tried this.

-- 
Hong