Comment 2 for bug 22728

Message-Id: <email address hidden>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 04:13:48 -0500
From: Branden Robinson <email address hidden>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <email address hidden>
Subject: mutt: opens of same mbox by multiple mutt processes erase message bodies

Package: mutt
Version: 1.5.11-1
Severity: critical

This is awful.

For years I have performed multiple opens of mbox files, using multiple
mutt processes.

For years it worked.

Now it doesn't.

Now, if you do this, message bodies will be nuked out of the folder and the
Content-Length: header rewritten to zero.

The latter appears to be a subtly different issue; the header was rewritten
for some but not all messages, and the ones with the nuked bodies were a
*subset* of the ones whose Content-Length: headers were written.

This is very, very, very, very bad behavior, and I would be deeply furious
about it if I hadn't been able to use e2undel on the remote host where my
mail spools to recover the ~150MB deleted spool file from a live filesystem
and extract the obliterated message bodies from it. I was miraculously
lucky. Anybody who spools mail locally, doesn't have root on the host
where their mail spools, or who uses ext3 would have been badly screwed.

Mutt should either go back to not destroying mailbox contents on multiple
opens, should implement a locking mechanism to prevent other copies of
itself from opening a given folder for writing at the same time, or
(easiest to implement but least useful), refuse to open a mailbox that
another Mutt process has open.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: powerpc (ppc)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.9-powerpc-smp
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages mutt depends on:
ii libc6 2.3.5-6 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libdb4.3 4.3.28-3 Berkeley v4.3 Database Libraries [
ii libgnutls12 1.2.6-1 the GNU TLS library - runtime libr
ii libidn11 0.5.18-1 GNU libidn library, implementation
ii libncursesw5 5.4-9 Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii libsasl2 2.1.19-1.6 Authentication abstraction library
ii postfix [mail-transport-agent 2.2.4-1 A high-performance mail transport

Versions of packages mutt recommends:
ii locales 2.3.5-6 GNU C Library: National Language (
ii mime-support 3.35-1 MIME files 'mime.types' & 'mailcap

-- no debconf information