[Techtalk] mutt, mbox mailboxes, FC6 and noticing new mail

[Akkana Peck]

Eeva Järvinen writes:
> My mutt has been behaving oddly as of late; in fact, post-upgrading to
> a new computer and FC6 from FC3.  I just copied my .muttrc,
> .procmailrc and the rest of mail-related configuration stuff over, and
> started using the system.  However, mutt doesn't seem to recognise
> there's new mail in mailboxes.  Or it does, but intermittently, and
> there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why.  

I haven't tried FC6, but my husband did and I know they play some
unusual games with partitions and filesystems, so it's possible
the problem may be noatime:

There's an option you can set on some filesystems called "noatime".
This tells the kernel not to update the last-accessed time of files
(the last time the file was read or otherwise accessed), just the
creation and modified times. This can be a significant performance
win on some systems, and you'll find documents here and there
recommending that you set this option if you're trying to improve
performance.

We tried that on our server a while back. Everything was fine until
I noticed that mutt no longer knew which folders had unread mail.
Mutt apparently uses atime to determine when you last read the folder,
and so for each folder, it keeps checking the atime (when you last
read it) to the mtime (the time the file was last modified, like
when Procmail or postfix dumped some new mail in). But if you have
noatime, then the atime never changes, so mutt never thinks there's
new mail.

I was talking about this with Val a while back, because apparently
the kernel folks (of whom she is one) were talking about atime and
whether it was important, and I mentioned the mutt problem. And she
came up with a nifty solution, submitted a kernel patch, and it
was accepted, though I don't know what kernel version it's in.
Here's something Val wrote about it: http://lwn.net/Articles/194013/

Anyway, check your mount options for that filesystem (either in
/etc/fstab, or by typing mount) and see if noatime is set. If so,
removing it will probably make mutt behave itself.

-- 
    ...Akkana
    "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional": http://gimpbook.com