Comment 1 for bug 55223

I can confirm this on a recently installed edgy.

/home was mounted nfs/autofs async and didn't have a problem.
/var/mail was mounted nfs/autofs sync, and opening more than one mutt, or waiting for the timeout, or something made the processes (a couple of mutts and a cat /var/mail/me) accessing /var/mail freeze. Even going to runlevel 1, I still couldn't kill them!

Now I changed the file in the hal source 00upstream-05-fix-stale_nfs_handle_block.patch (in debian/patches)
which already handled the nfs part of the patch. I added the autofs part. And rebuilt and installed the new hal.

As far as I can tell it is solved now. I've opened several mutts, and made different changes to the inbox in different instances, and they are not complaining, but updating correctly.