mailbox.mbox not locking mbox properly

[tinnews at isbd.co.uk]

Tim Roberts <timr at probo.com> wrote:
> tinnews at isbd.co.uk wrote:
> >
> >I'm using the python mailbox class in a script that processes incoming
> >mail and delivers it to various mbox format mailboxes.  It appears
> >that, although I am calling the lock method on the destination before
> >writing to the mbox and calling unlock afterwards the locking isn't
> >working correctly.
> >...
> >So it seems that python's mailbox class locking isn't playing nicely
> >with mutt's mailbox locking whereas postfix's locking does work
> >correctly.
> 
> Correct.  The "dest.flush()" method creates a temporary file, copies the
> entire modified mailbox into it, removed the original file, and renames the
> temp file into place.
> 
Yes, I just took a look at the mailbox.py code and it does exactly
that which of course screws up just about any normal MUA looking at
the mbox.  Grrrrrr!


> The Postfix MDA, like most MDAs, just opens the existing file and appends
> the new data to it.
> 
> >Has anyone seen this problem before, and/or do I need to anything more
> >than the following for the locking to work correctly:-
> 
> It's not the locking.  It's the flush mechanism.  The mbox class doesn't
> know that the ONLY thing you did was an append.  You might have modified
> other messages in the middle.  If you want to do an append, you'll need to
> write your own subclass of mbox.

OK, thanks.  In reality I can probably just use straightforward file
reading and writing as the *only* thing I will ever be doing is to
append a message to a mailbox file.

I think there should be a big warning in the mailbox documentation to
this effect as doing it the way that Python's mailbox class does it
will break all sorts of things.  There should maybe be a specific
'append' method.

-- 
Chris Green