Re: [Pan-users] pan.sendlater oddness.

[Duncan]

On Tue 15 Apr 2003 23:33, Bobby D. Bryant posted as excerpted below:
> Worked like a charm, thanks.

Cool!  I was losing my copy of sent posts (from pan.sent) for some time, due 
to corruption.  Deleting the folder (file at that time, see below) fixed the 
problem.  I wish I had known about that earlier, as it was an easy fix.

> BTW, is it natural for me to have both of these:
>
> % ls -lu .pan/data/folders/pan.sent.mbox
> -rw-rw-r--    1 bdbryant bdbryant  5597753 Apr 14 22:17
> .pan/data/folders/pan.sent.mbox
>
> % ls -lud .pan/data/messages/folders/pan.sent
> drwx------    2 bdbryant bdbryant    69632 Apr 16 00:32
> .pan/data/messages/folders/pan.sent

The mbox format one is old.  PAN recently switched to maildir, which is IMO 
preferable.  (The downside is the same as with all schemes that have large 
numbers of small files -- it wastes space on file systems not designed to 
pack files.  ext2/3 for instance uses 1K blocks, IIRC, meaning a file takes 
1k disk space even if it's a single character.  Packed filesystems such as 
the reiserfs I chose to use don't have this problem.  The upside is 
potentially better stability, and less loss of data if one message out of 
several thousand in the folder is corrupt, as they are individual files.  
With a folder such as send.later, however, and since you didn't say there was 
anything there you needed to keep, just deleting the entire dir is easier, so 
that's what I said to do.)

IOW, it should be safe to delete the mbox file.  It should have been done upon 
conversion, I think, but perhaps a conversion bug screwed it.  Actually, 
that's what pushed me into investigating the folders, so I could answer as I 
did your earlier question, but since my mbox was corrupt, the converted 
maildir was as well, and I was getting PAN crashes because of it, in the 
first beta after the conversion.  Deleting the corruption fixed the crashes, 
tho I'd been experiencing earlier oddness just as you had been, due to the 
earlier corruption that the conversion compounded into a crashing scenario.

If that all makes sense...  <g>

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin