[comp.mail.sendmail] Seeking failure-proof binmail

hubert@cac.washington.edu (Steve Hubert) (11/08/90)

I was about to start writing a new local mailer but figured there must
be dozens of these around.  I am looking for a local mailer (a.k.a.
/bin/mail) that does the right thing when disks fill up.  It should
check return values for writes in /tmp and in /usr/spool/mail and
should fail gracefully when an error occurs.  That is, its exit status
ought to be EX_TEMPFAIL if the failure is due to a full disk and it
ought not to modify the mailbox at all unless it can put the whole
message there correctly.  Does anybody have one of these?  I would
prefer a version which works with old-fashioned usr.lock style locking
as opposed to flock() style locking but I'll gladly take anything anyone
has to offer.

Thanks,
Steve Hubert
Networks and Distributed Computing, Univ. of Wash., Seattle
hubert@cac.washington.edu