Sometimes, more often than I would have liked, during a mass mailing
people are reporting an error that begins like this,

"Warning! Mailout seems broken!"

What that means is that something got corrupted in the files that make
up a mass mailing

How that happens - I don't know

My guess is that it's a race condition: two processes are trying to
write to the same file and the file just gets obliterated

There's safeguards against this: in the code, the directory of files
that makes up a mass mailing is locked, using a semaphore file This
means that only one process can work on mass mailing, by sending
mail out, while the batch is locked I thought this would also stop
files from being corrupted, but I seem to be wrong

So, tonight, I put in support for every single file written to in that
directory of files to have its own semaphore file This should
seriously stop any sort of corruption from happening

Will it work perfectly? I don't know, but I'll release a snapshot of
Dada Mail with these changes in, as soon as I can I really need
feedback on these sorts of things, so if you can install and give it a
try, it is very much appreciated If that's too much trouble, it's
really really easy to run the automated tests if you have linux/unix/ Mac OS X:

Just download the distribution, unpack it, and run the, "prove -r"
command while in the, "dada" directory, via the command line - no
configuration necessary It takes a few minutes and a bunch of stuff
gets printed out, but if all the tests pass, we're in good shape

Right now, they are, which is good! But, I'm only testing on one or
two (or, perhaps three) platforms at one time More test results would
def come in handy

Anyways, something to look forward to

Also, there was a quite active thread in the past couple days on the
boards:

http://dadamailproject
com/support/boards/viewtopic
php?f=4&t=375&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Which sparked this bug:

https://sourceforge
net/tracker/index
php?func=detail&aid=2148744&group_id=13002&atid=113002

Which, partly has its fix with a clarification of the advanced
installation docs:

http://dadamailproject
com/installation/installation_advanced
html#_program_root_password__the_dada_mail_root_password

Are there any other comments about all this? I'd like to have the
install instructions be as clear and consise as possible, but I'm in
probably the worst position to write really really good docs, being
the developer and all, so a fresh pair of eyes is always beneficial,

Also, I still would love to have more comments about, "RFC: New
Features for Dada Mail 3 1 (and beyond)":

http://dadamailproject
com/support/boards/viewtopic
php?f=23&t=483

The one big feature I didn't put down is a plugin to turn Dada Mail in
sort of an auto-responder I loathe the idea, probably because I'll
never use it, but I could see value in it, if other people see it
useful