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Procmail Maildir messages disappearing

Google-friendly title, no?

Executive summary:

In your ~/.procmailrc

MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir – is BAD, whereas

MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/ – is good.

The slash at the end appears to tell procmail that this is a Maildir directory, rather than something else, elusive.

For a week my messages were appearing in $HOME/Maildir, but they were just in there with names like msg.zFS, instead of going into $HOME/Maildir/new and having a name like 1282544959.Q22432E173.192.0.54.2:1,T.

This meant they effectively disappeared, and I had a quiet, relaxing week.

Followed by a panicked and expletive-filled hour or so.

When I put the slash back, new messages started appearing in my Inbox again.

I was also able just to move the msg.zFS files into “new”, and they appeared fine, which was nice.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 8:08 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Procmail Maildir messages disappearing”

  1. Charles Bailey Says:
    June 26th, 2007 at 8:33 am

    I think you should have:
    MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
    and
    DEFAULT=${MAILDIR}/

    This specifies where your Maildir “tree” is, and that by default you want to deliver into that directory as a top level Maildir format folder.

  2. Andy Balaam Says:
    June 26th, 2007 at 8:35 am

    I’m not going to touch it ever again. It made me too frightened.

  3. Charles Bailey Says:
    June 26th, 2007 at 8:51 am

    OK, I admit it, perhaps I’m wrong. I’ve just checked my /etc/procmail.
    MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/
    DEFAULT=$MAILDIR

  4. Andy Balaam Says:
    June 26th, 2007 at 4:15 pm

    Today truly is a special day.

  5. Charles Bailey Says:
    June 27th, 2007 at 6:45 am

    Right, in order not to be wrong I’ve changed it to this:

    MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
    DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/

    and am so far suffering from no adverse affects.

  6. Andy Balaam Says:
    June 27th, 2007 at 7:40 am

    I feel much more comfortable now reality has been restored.

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