I recently upgrade my home machine to Ubuntu Hardy. Lots of teething issues including the rt2500 based wireless card not working with 2.6.24 kernels.
However the one thing that caught me by surprise was Mutt stopped seeing new mail in folders other than $MBOX.
After checking that I was receiving email fine, my attention turned to the method Mutt uses to detect “new mail in mbox format folders”. By default it relys on the atime. Which works fine until something else accesses your ~/Mail/ e.g. backups running.
I’m not sure when Ubuntu introduced Trackerd, but the upgrade to Hardy appears to have either introduced it or started it by default for the first time. It’s basically a search engine for your hard drive. Unfortunately when it reads files this resets the atime. This makes Mutt sad.
At first I was tempted to turn it off seeing as I’ve never used it. However, realising that it’s possible to mount partitions ‘noatime’ I figured the Mutt guys would have provided another way to do this.
set check_mbox_size = yes
Woot.