Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!proteon.com!jas From: jas@proteon.com (John A. Shriver) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug Subject: rmail gather mail loss window Message-ID: <8811291555.AA02023@monk.proteon.com> Date: 29 Nov 88 15:55:50 GMT Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Distribution: gnu Organization: GNUs Not Usenet Lines: 19 Basics: gnuemacs 18.50, running on MicroVAX-II, Ultrix-32 V2.2. I was starting gnuemacs (emacs -e rmail) to read in my mail (0.7 MB of it!). The machine decided to crash while the mail was being gathered (there was a fatal I/O error to the swap partition, presumably as gumenacs was growing it's memory use). The mail was lost. It was not in /usr/spool/mail/jas, it was not in ~/mail/RMAIL (my rmail-file-name), it was not in ~/mail/.newmail (the rmail-mode default-directory is ~/mail/). The only place it could be found was in the vmcore from the system core dump, and not in very useful form (hop skip and jump every 512 bytes). There seems to be some level of defensive programming missing. The original /usr/spool/mail/jas should not have gone away until gmuemace was highly confident that the copy thereof (.newmail ?) was soundly on disk. (Not just somewhere in the write cache of the filesystem.) The rmail gathering functions have proven to be very sound in the face of disks filling up, which happens regularly here.