[comp.mail.elm] Elm 2.1: disappearing messages

horton@ingr.com. (Mac Horton) (01/07/89)

	This is an anecdotal sort of problem report, but the phenomenon
is so alarming that I thought I'd ask whether anyone else has seen it:

	It's only in the past three or four weeks that elm 2.1 has been
used much here.  Since then I and several other people have reported
receiving messages which contained only headers, no user text.  In at
least one case I know with certainty that the text was edited and saved
to the temp file.  I have tried casually to reproduce it and haven't
been able to.  No one can recall it ever having happened with 1.5b, our
previous version.  Mailx users (of whom there are many) don't report the
problem. 

	Does this sound like anything anyone else has seen?  I will be
delighted if you tell me it's fixed in 2.1.1, which we will install soon.
Thanks.
-- 
Mac Horton 		|  Horton's the first I call.  He loved 
mac!horton@INGR.COM	|  	strange thought...
..uunet!ingr!mac!horton |				--W.B. Yeats

rich@jolnet.ORPK.IL.US (Rich Andrews) (01/08/89)

Gee I thought that is due to the user not typing in any text......
I have seen it at this site also and will try and duplicate it.

rich

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pete@hpmwtd.HP.COM (Bob Pete) (01/12/89)

I have seen this all too often here but have been able to track it down to
a problem related to 'vi'.  Elm creates a temporary file of it's own, if you
write the contents of the buffer to a different file 'vi' sets the update
flag to true.  Now if you do a ZZ 'vi' thinks it has already updated the Elm
created temporary file and writes nothing to it.  I have been able to replicate
this both in and out of Elm using 'vi'.  The only fix I know of, no source
liscence, is to tell the users about the potential problem.

------

Bob Pete

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