archivemail-0.6.1 not working as expected

[Oliver Fuchs]

On Tue, 01 Jun 2004, Simon Barner wrote:

> Oliver Fuchs wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I want to use archivemail-0.6.1 (Python 2.3.2) on FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE.
> > I have three questions/problems with the proper use:
> > 
> > 1) I get the error message:
> > /usr/local/bin/archivemail:760: SyntaxWarning: assignment to None
> >   (None, last_dir) = os.path.split(os.path.dirname(message.fp.name))
> > I found the answer (Google) and a patch (it is a problem depending 
> > on Python 2.3). Is there another solution to this problem?
> 
> Update your ports. It's fixed in archivemail-0.6.1_1. Apart from that,
> it's only a syntax _warning_ (which of course can be quite annoying if you
> rung archivemail from a cron job and receive an error report every
> day), i.e. archivemail works despite of that message.

Good advice ... thanx for that ...

> 
> > 2) Running 
> >        archivemail -d90 -o $HOME/Mail/Archive $HOME/Mail/*
> 
> [...]

I still have no clue about that

> 
> > 3) I want to run it in a cron job but to be honest I am not quiet sure where
> > to put my archive script.
> 
> [...]
> 
> You're lucky:
> 
> Several months ago, I did exactly the same thing. You should put the
> cron job into your personal cron tab, i.e. as the user who's mail should
> be processed by archivemail, run 
> 
> crontab -e

Ah ... o.k 

> 
> (The other stuff you were looking at were system wide cron jobs).

So to make it clear: If I want to run a cron job for a special user I use
crontab and otherwise to run a system-wide cron-job that is not defined by
FreeBSD itself I use /usr/local/etc/periodic?

> 
> Okay, here comes my config:
> 
> From my cron tab (the following line starts my mailexpire script every
> day at 19:30)
> 
> 30	19	*	*	*	/home/simon/bin/mailexpire.sh
> 
> -------------------------
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> 
> # mail boxes to by processed by archive mail
> MBOXES="freebsd-ports.box\
>         freebsd-questions.box"
> 
> cd /home/simon/Mail;
> 
> # be sure to change the archivemail options to your personal needs
> for box in $MBOXES; do
> 	/usr/local/bin/archivemail -d 21 --delete -q $box
> done

Græat - thanx for the script

> 
> -------------------------
> 
> All this works very well for me, although every other day, I get an email
> from archivemail that one of my mail boxes changed during its operation.

this is only happening on FreeBSD side - I never saw it on Linux before

> This shouldn't normally happen, since both archivemail and fetchmail (which
> I use to download my email) use several locking mechanisms to insure that
> only one of them is operating on particular mail box. IIRC the
> archivemail man page elaborates more on this.

Yes, a little bit skimped

>
> 
> 
> Since archivemail is designed not to trash/loose your mail boxes under any
> circumstances, this was never a problem for me. Anyway, I wouldn't use
> archive mail for my personal mail boxes, but only for mailing lists,
> where you still have the archives, just in case ...

I never saw it from this angle but I am going to consider this

> 
> Cheers,
>  Simon

So thank you again for all your help and work

Oliver


-- 
... don't touch the bang bang fruit