Option to not update Atime on filesystems not mounted noatime

[Paul Slootman]

On Thu 02 Aug 2007, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> On 8/2/07, Matthias Schniedermeyer <ms at citd.de> wrote:
> > I have a single filesystem i don't mount noatime because mutt would work
> > very good otherwise.
> 
> IMHO, mutt is broken for relying on atimes because other programs
> reading the mailbox will cause mutt to miss new mail.  It would be

This is the way unix mail programs have determined the "new mail" state
for a long time...  If some other program reads the mailbox file, then
presumably that's also a mail program, so then the new mail has been
seen by some other means and it's not a problem that mutt doesn't flag
the new mail.  Having a backup program do the same is indeed not what
you want...  I must say that I'm hard-pressed to come up with another
way of figuring out whether there's new mail, aside from switching to
Maildir format.


Paul Slootman