help - mail already being read?

by Simon Forma » Sat, 03 Oct 1998 04:00:00

Hello,

I'm having a problem with POP3 mail retrieval. When I telnet to port 110
of my mail server I get 'ERR mail already being read in ...'.
The mail server is another linux box sitting next to me. I'm sure nobody
else is actually reading my mail so how do I tell pop3d?
I've tried deleting the spool file and rebooting but no joy.

Simon.

Top

1. POP3 server error: -ERR being read already /usr/spool/mail/<username>

I hope someone can help me figure this out... web searches have so far
proven less than helpful.

The problem I'm having is when trying to fetch mail from my Linux box
with a POP3 client, I get the following error:

-ERR being read already /usr/spool/mail/brian

If I telnet to port 110 and authenticate with USER and PASS, it gives
the same error. I have discovered that if the maildrop
(/var/spool/mail/brian) is not present or is zero bytes, then I get
this:

+OK 0 messages ready for brian in /usr/spool/mail/brian

I have searched high and low for any stale lockfiles (in /tmp, /var/tmp,
/var/lock, var/spool/mail) and have found none. I've even gone as far
as killing sendmail in case it was locking the maildrops...no luck. ps
-ax shows no process that I can imagine would have any reason to lock
the maildrops.

A little background information:
/usr/bin/in.pop3d tells me it's version 1.005l (that's a lowercase L
at the end, not a numeral 1).
permissions on /var/spool/mail: drwxrwxr-x, user:root, group:mail
permissions on /var/spool/mail/brian: -rw-rw----, user:brian,
group:mail
kernel is v2.0.34 (yes, I know it's old...but I had POP3 working on
this box before)
distribution is Slackware v3.5.0

I'd love to get this working, but I'm out of ideas.

Thanks,
Brian Cochrane

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