RS> I've just this am been fanged on the arse by yet another
RS> problem which caused lost outgoing mail without the
RS> slightest hint of an error message.

FM> What was the prob?

Sorry, should have spelt it out. If you open quite a few QWKs,
you can get a situation where after writing some mail there aint
a lot of free space on that particular partition, even if say you
have 4MB free initially.

In that situation the usually way to close OLX down would be just to
Alt-X and let it do its thing. The trouble is that it makes up the
REP first. The first thing it does is extract the outgoing mail from
the OUTBOX to a separate file, then passes that to PKZIP or whatever
archiver you have specified, for that to be compressed to the REP.
Now the extraction of the mail from the OUTBOX doesnt even notice
if its runout of space, you just get a bit of a mess at the end of
the file. That file compresses up ok and QWK2PKT never even murmurs
about the scrambling at the end of the file.

In theory OLX does check free space on the drive as it opens QWKs
but it guesses from the size of the QWK and you can get a situation
where answering mail can consume the free space if you have quite a
few QWKs open, particularly larger ones.

OLX generally doesnt check free space when doing file ops otherwise
and that can bite it on the bum when cleaning up the IN and OUT boxes
too. Tho those are done say daily so you tend to ensure that there
is enough free space for those.

--- PQWK202