There is a very annoying problem "Messages not removed from POP3 server" when using dada_bridge

I have noticed this problem once before, but could not reproduce it at that time But last Friday, it showed up again and this time I could reproduce the problem for 100% So this was my chance to find out what is really going on

The strange thing is that the problem only shows up when 2 or more messages are in the POP3 box And only the first 2 messages are sent and archived, the rest is ignored

I spend many hours debugging and find out that the $pop object inside dada_bridge was destroyed just after calling sub archive( ) Strange, isn't it?

So I decided to make $pop a global variable and export it to the other modules Now I could find out exactly where $pop really became corrupted After many more hours debugging I discovered that the $pop object became invalid just after the following line from sub "lockdb" from module "GenericDBFile":

sysopen(DB_SAFETYLOCK, $self->lockfilename, O_RDWR|O_CREAT, $FILE_CHMOD)

which reminded me immediately about bug item #1263035 " archivesdb lock file not removed" When I looked at "$self->lockfilename" it was referring to this archivesdb lock file indeed! Also, when I removed the lock file manually, the problem disappeared!

So I did the following test: I removed the call to archive( ) inside dada_bridge and replaced it by the following lines copied from "lockdb":

use Fcntl qw( O_WRONLY O_TRUNC O_CREAT O_CREAT O_RDWR O_RDONLY LOCK_EX LOCK_SH LOCK_NB);

my $fname='[cut]/test_archivesdb lock';

sysopen(DB_SAFETYLOCK, $fname, O_RDWR|O_CREAT, $FILE_CHMOD); chmod($FILE_CHMOD, $fname); { my $sleep_count = 0; { flock (DB_SAFETYLOCK, LOCK_EX | LOCK_NB) and last; sleep 1; redo if ++$sleep_count < 11; die "$PROGRAM_NAME $VER Warning: Server is way too busy to open list db file," $fname " - $!\n"; } }

And, as expected, the problem showed up right away: when 2 or more messages were sent to the POP3 box, the messages are not removed from the server That means, the $pop variable is destroyed when the above lines are executed twice

Although I still do not know what the relation is between $pop and system calls, I am pretty sure now that when the archivesdb lock file problem is solved, the undeleted POP3 messages problem will not show up anymore also

Justin, maybe you can shed a bit more light on this?

Frans