thunderbird, samba and file locking?

[Kristian Rink]

Folks;

Experiencing a rather strange error on one of our file servers.
Situation: Our users internally do use Mozilla Thunderbird (Windows) to
do their mail handling, and they excessively do save attachments to a
network drive (hosted on a samba machine) to, then, let our internal
document management system automatically import them. The DMS, running
on a Windows2003 server, is supposed to read the files stored on the
samba drive, process them, delete them afterwards.

The last part, however, in most cases fails: Having attachments saved
from Windows Thunderbird to the Samba drive, in the majority of cases I
am unable to delete them using the DMS (or Windows Explorer, for that
matters), getting an error instead that this file is currently locked,
maybe in use by someone else (it surely is not). This is utterly
annoying. I know it's Thunderbird to blame because as soon as I do
terminate the Thunderbird process that saved the attachment, the file
may be deleted right away.

Can anyone imagine ideas how to overcome this problems, be that Samba
or Thunderbird configuration? I don't like the idea to generally
disable locking in Samba as it seems a dangerous thing to do in a
multi-user environment, but this situation right now is pretty
uncomfortable...

Thanks in advance for any hints, best regards.
Kristian

-- 
Kristian Rink * http://zimmer428.net * http://flickr.com/photos/z428/
jab: kawazu at jabber.ccc.de * icq: 48874445 * fon: ++49 176 2447 2771
"One dreaming alone, it will be only a dream; many dreaming together
is the beginning of a new reality." (Hundertwasser)