POP mailbox lock?

[pixboy]

Our production mail server runs Netscape Messaging Server 3.6. I've been testing NMS 4.15 patch 7 on another machine, and just ran into a strange thing. NMS 4.15 does not seem to lock a mailbox when you log into it. NMS 3.6 does, and I thought every POP server did. (In checking in a few places, I seem to have found that this isn't the case, but I wonder what ever happened to that idea?)

In case I'm not being clear as to what I mean, normally, when you connect to your mailbox via POP3, the server locks the account, which would prevent you from logging in from another e-mail client. The reasoning is that if you were to connect to the same mailbox from two places, it's possible for one connection to delete a message that the other connection is trying to retrieve. That, as you can imagine, is a Bad Thing.

To test the idea, I connected to my NMS 4.15 server from two different places, logging on to the same mailbox. There were two messages in the mailbox. I retrieved message 1 from both, then told one session to delete the message. The second session still had message 1 listed, and could retrieve it fine. I then deleted the second message, and found that the other session could still retrieve that message. It was almost as if the two sessions were completely independent of each other, and actions in one seemed to have zero impact on the other session.

I've just dug through the NMS 4.15 manuals, but no mention of POP locking anywhere. Same on a few Google searches, as well as in this forum.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[spinny]

I do understand your confusion and happened across the detailed description of this when reading the command line utilities directions (in Appendix A I think). The description of this is listed under the "stored" command that runs once a day to delete files marked for deletion. This allows concurrent sessions to be allowed access to a single mail box in case you wanted a group to have access to the same information. When you delete any message in your mail it marks it for deletion. The file isn't actually deleted until the stored command runs and does a clean up of all files marked for deletion. Your server is working the way it was designed......

I neat by product of this is the ability to actually delete a user, then immediately put them back into your system and they won't lose any of their email....assuming that stored doesn't run in the mean time.

Hope this sheds some light.

Spinny

 

[pixboy]

Very interesting. I can see the benefit of concurrent sessions. It was just something that took me by surprise, since it seemed the POP lock was a standard thing. However, in checking a few other POP servers I use, I found that the only one that created a POP lock was our own production server. Maybe I'm just a little behind the times in my thinking ...

Thanks for the insight!