Bug 74622 – Evolution can't lock /var/spool/mail with mailbase 0.00-r6

• Status: RESOLVED CANTFIX
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Joël 2004-12-16 05:47:22 UTC]

Reverting to net-mail/mailbase-0.00-r5 fixes the problem.

Evolution is =mail-client/evolution-2.0.2.

[Comment 1 Antek Grzymała (antoszka) 2004-12-16 13:50:32 UTC]

Also breaks mutt -- mailbox is opened in read-only mode. Reverting to -r5 fixed both evolution and mutt for me.

[Comment 2 Markku 2004-12-17 05:18:47 UTC]

chmod 1777 /var/spool/mail fixes the problem

[Comment 3 Heinrich Nirschl 2004-12-17 07:03:27 UTC]

Same happens with net-www/mozilla-1.7.3. Changing the permissions of /var/spool/mail to 1777 fixes that as well.

[Comment 4 Tuan Van (RETIRED) 2004-12-17 09:17:47 UTC]

Daniel, I saw your name in bug #16749. CCing you to see if you can help with the issue?

[Comment 5 Don Seiler (RETIRED) 2004-12-17 10:07:08 UTC]

I've been on -r6 since July, use both Evolution-2.0.2 and mutt on different boxes and haven't seen this problem at all.  langthang asked me to note this.

[Comment 6 Lotso 2004-12-17 18:50:41 UTC]

pulling this in last night left me with nightmares.

changing to 1777 works again. but as bug 8029 mentions, other distros works. What gives?

[Comment 7 Joe McCann (RETIRED) 2004-12-18 10:09:42 UTC]

*** Bug 74847 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Comment 8 Stanislav Brabec 2004-12-19 07:58:22 UTC]

Many mail clients needs to be recompiled after this change. For example mutt has a configure check for it, and if it has 775, it installs sgid wrapper (mutt_dotlock).

On my machine, at least mutt, mozilla and evolution work with 775 without any problems.

[Comment 9 Danek Duvall 2004-12-19 08:53:35 UTC]

That may work for mutt, but recompiling pine and uw-imap don't fix their whining (as those were what I reported were broken in bug 74847).

[Comment 10 Heinrich Nirschl 2004-12-21 08:41:17 UTC]

I cannot confirm what was stated in comment #8. On my machine mozilla-1.7.3 and mozilla-1.7.5 do not work with permissions 775 on /var/spool/mail. Recompilation did not help.

[Comment 11 foser (RETIRED) 2004-12-28 07:08:57 UTC]

can any of the net-mail herd comment ? Obviously there is some sort of problem here introduced by the new mailbase. If it's a permission issue, what is the reason not to revert the change ?

[Comment 12 Markku 2005-01-08 09:29:53 UTC]

I just installed a new gentoo system and evolution works with mailbase-0.00-r6.  

[Comment 13 splite 2005-01-26 08:26:20 UTC]

Neither pine nor uw-imap are going to work correctly without a 1777 mail spool unless you use an external setgid-mail locking utility, such as mlock.  See 

http://www.washington.edu/imap/IMAP-FAQs/index.html#7.10

which also applies to pine.  The uw-imap ebuild installs /usr/bin/mlock, but doesn't make it setgid mail.

See bug 16749 for background on why the default perms were changed.  I think it was pretty short-sighted to change the perms without verifying that the clients still worked, but there ya go.

[Comment 14 Fernando J. Pereda (RETIRED) 2005-03-06 05:50:03 UTC]

The permissions set by mailbase are correct. I've pinged some evolution and mutt users (i use mutt with no problems) and they have no problems with that permissions. I think mutt and evolution check those permissions at compilation time and there is nothing we can do about it.

Is anyone still having this problem ?

Cheers,
Ferdy

[Comment 15 Joël 2005-03-06 09:30:08 UTC]

Hello, now, everything seems to work fine with the following versions:
- evolution 2.0.4
- mailbase 0.00-r8

Thanks
Jo

[Comment 16 Joël 2005-03-06 09:30:08 UTC]

Hello, now, everything seems to work fine with the following versions:
- evolution 2.0.4
- mailbase 0.00-r8

Thanks
Joël

[Comment 17 Fernando J. Pereda (RETIRED) 2005-03-08 05:05:00 UTC]

I think this one was probably related to older versions of evolution/mailbase or something like that. It's something we just can't fix.

Reopen if you still get a non-expected behavior.

Cheers,
Ferdy