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.