database lock when building first time?

[jacobSingh]

I followed the quickstart instructions, and I get this when indexing for the first time.

Cannot open lock file /home/jacob/.mairix_database.lock.13228.ip-172-30-2-219 for writing

Permissions are fine and am running as the user in question. No .mairix_* files are created

[vandry]

I can't reproduce this and I don't think there should be any particular problem with the lock file upon first indexing. I would look for a local problem.

What is the value of the database= field in ~/.mairixrc ? I think it must be
database=/home/jacob/.mairix_database
in your case?

Are you able to create the file in question yourself with touch or something else?

Unfortunately mairix does not log the reason it was unable to open the file, which might have been helpful, but if you are running on Linux you might try using strace to find it:

strace -e trace=open,link mairix

What are the permissions on /home/jacob exactly? Are you sure mairix should be able to write to it?