kmail lock file problems

[Gene Heskett]

Greetings all;

A fresh pclinuxos-2010-7 install here, which is apt based.  This includes 
kde-4.4.5.  PCLinuxOS doesn't have a mailing list, just a forum, and in 
about 24 hours, 2 posts on 2 subjects have not generated an answer on their 
forum.  So here I am, hat in hand.

I have a wierd message in the bottom of the kmail frame when it tries to 
access the local mail-file /var/spool/mail/gene.

Transmission failed: Could not lock /var/spool/mail/gene.

This file is being fed from a chain starting with fetchmail, using procmail 
as the MDA, going through spamassassin for most msgs before the message gets 
appended to the above file.

kmail thinks procmail is using a /dev/null for lockfile, so that is the 
first puzzle, and I can change it all I want but the next time I look, its 
/dev/null again.  That may be problem #1, but I don't have any lockfiles 
setup in my procmail recipes, and haven't needed them in the 5 or 6 years I 
have been doing my mail fetching this way.

I found that if _I_ touched /var/spool/mail/gene.lock, it will work, but 
then deletes it after it parses the mail file once.  Then the next time 
kmail goes to get the mail, it fails, reporting the above error again.

I even put a pre-command in the profile to have kmail touch the lock file, 
and that at least puts the gene.lock lockfile in place, but it doesn't make 
any diff to kmail, same error message.  However, that does prevent procmail 
from appending to the mail-file.  So as soon as I deleted it, the file grew 
20k.

Is this a known kmail-1.13-5 bug?  It sure is a PIMA. :-\

Thanks folks.

Cheers, Gene (I have got to get my sig generator working)