Wise monks,

When I took over legacy POP3 mail processing production code years ago, it had a number of bugs to fix. Not having much time to do it, I fixed some of the bugs as time permitted.

A serious bug that's a bit over my head is when concurrent POP3-clients try to delete the same mail message using Mail::POP3Client -
each client would first fetch the mail at $id, read the headers to see if the message-id is the right one, then delete it on the POP3 server.
Imagine two clients trying to do that with the same message - each would fetch it, find it to be the right one and send the delete request. Add a little network latency and two different messages would be deleted.

I guess I am looking for a kind of file/Flock way to allow only one client at a time to prepare and execute a deletion, having the others wait until it has finished.
But I am certain, other people will have had the same problem before me and may have got better solutions. Could you point me towards it?

Cheers, Sören

In reply to Locking a POP3 Mailbox by Happy-the-monk

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