From: Rob (bringmandog-slow.org)
Date: Tue Apr 01 2003 - 11:02:11 CST

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Thanks for the quick reply. I failed to understand the difference
between the spool file and the storage file.

For the sake of the archives, $MAIL is where incoming mail gets delivered,
and $MBOX is where the mail command saves old mail (defaults to ~/mbox).
Setting them both to the same thing results in lost mail.

On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 11:47:21AM -0500, Marcus Watts wrote:
> The mail program wants to archive mail in "mbox", and thinks that your
> incoming mail goes somewhere else (like /var/spool/mail/$LOGIN). When
> you quit out of mail, it copied the mail that you had read into mbox,
> then truncated your incoming mail. Since you had told it your incoming
> mail went to "mbox", the result was that it threw away the mail it had just
> "saved". Clearly, a failure of the "read_user_mind(3)" library call
> everybody thinks is built into the system, especially around April 1st.
>
> Probably you don't want to deliver mail to "~/mbox", if you use mailx.
> Maybe ~/inbox instead? Perhaps mailx should check to see if
> mbox == $MAIL, but it's not clear what it should do if that
> should be true.
>
> -Marcus Watts

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