From Newsgroup: comp.mail.pine
On 2026-07-30, Chime Hart <
chime@hubert-humphrey.com> wrote:
Well, in several threads from 2004-2022 I read all messages on this topic. While I don't have a fix, as I am not a programmer, I did some experimenting.
First I thought that useing an aggregat command over many hours seemed to cause
this behavior. No, happens with or without an aggregat. Then I tried opening 2
separate sessions of Alpine among both a desktop-and-a laptop, both in Debian
SID, both over IMAP. Well, when the folders would close, they were on both machines at similar times. Its really nice having an option of opening Alpine
on 2 separate machines. An even more anoying aspect of the folder becoming read
only, any aggregat items are not marked any more, but messages already read-and-deleted would be expunged upon leaving Alpine. For at least 2years a
folder called "fastmail" is receiving new mail, but the local mailbox is in /var/mail/chime-and-used to automaticly receive new messages. I have a suspicion that if I were reading in my local mailbox, I might not have a folder
closed by an access error. I am running fetchmail-and-exim4 but don't really understand what if any changes to always have newer mail endup in /var/mail/chime? Before I only had folder close while in news groups. An only
way I could test would be to move several hundred messages manually-and-read in
that folder, but I probably wouldn't hear the bell ring for new mail. Thanks
so much in advance
Chime
I think it would depend on the IMAP server you were connecting to. I get
the same behaviour as you when accessing my imap server (the Uni of
Washington imap server I have running on my home server).
The server has to maintain consistancy on the mailboxes it is serving
and having more than one instance read and writing randomly can corrupt things. File locking etc can mitigate this, as can the mailbox format
being used. But sometimes it's just easier for the imap server to
make one instance readonly.
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2