SUMMARY: too many pop files

From: adeluca@esrin.esa.it
Date: Tue May 20 1997 - 03:07:03 CDT


Hi,
I received two answer about this problem and I fixed it.

My original question was :
------------------

>Hi ,
>does anyone know why sometimes on my mail server every minute there is a
pop file from the same user ?
>This is a problem because I must cancel those files or reboot the machine
..
>Thanks in advance
>Alfredo
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Answer from Frank Pardo : thanks
-------

Your user probably told his browser to check for POP3 mail once per
minute. If the browser is Netscape Navigator, tell him to go into the
"Mail and News Preferences" menu and change the interval to 10 minutes
or more. Sorry, I don't know how to adjust it in browsers other than
Netscape.

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Answer from Jim Harmon: thanks
-------
I think I may have seen something like this with one of my users.

I think what you are describing is that you have a user with multiple
..pop.<user> files.

The one time I think we had this problem it was involved with a user who
had an NIS entry and a local file entry in the /etc/passwd file.

The two entries were slightly different, and the dir paths for the
user's home directory was slightly wrong for both passwd files.
Apparently POP got confused each time the user got mail, so POP created
a new pop file over and over.

I think the POP file also got created with the wrong permissions so it
couldn't update the old file, instead created the new one(s).

I should have taken notes when working on this, but the system was going
offline when it filled all available space on the drive with filenames,
so I don't have all the details.

ANOTHER situatin that we had was a user's PC with NT 3.5.1 got wierd and
tried to read the mail every 10 seconds, not creating a new pop file,
but creating a new pop session every 10 seconds until the network
crashed. What was wierd was the user wasn't in the office, had no mail
waiting, and the interval set for checking his mail was set for every 15
minutes. That situation required reinstalling Netscape on the user's
machine after disconnecting him from the network.



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