[GTALUG] mbox/Maildir [was: Re: Interesting essay on filesystem consistency]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: David Collier-Brown <davec-b at rogers.com>

| mbox works well if the person writing the code knows Unix V6 primitives. If
| not, they can fail (;-))
| For messages larger than the atomic-write size of the filesystem, mbox can
| have a race condition, as it depends on atomicity of writes to end-of-file to
| append a whole message at a time.

I'm pretty sure that the programs I currently use to access mbox files
use locking.  procmail uses lockfile(1); I don't know if alpine uses
the same locking.