On Sat, 01 Jun 2019 09:17:16 -0500 "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net>
wrote:
I recently worked on my Debian box and mail began stacking up
from cron jobs that were erroring out because I had temporarily
removed the normal shell environment I use so I began getting the
"you have new mail" message which happens when the system checks
your mail queue as the shell prompt appears.
It's the shell that checks $MAIL (or $MAILPATH). If either is
defined, you can your system mailbox
ls -l $MAIL # or $MAILPATH
when the shell informs you have mail.
I certainly can read the messages if I type mail but I
seem to recall one can type the inc command and all those
messages will slurp right in to nmh.
Looks like inc pays attention to $MAILDROP and if it is not
set and profile entry MailDrop is not set, it looks into
/var/mail/$USER. Not sure if it ever checks $MAIL or $MAILPATH.
When things are normal, procmail calls a small shell
script that sends the bell character to all logged-in sessions
and I put things back to normal and tried inc so all those
/bin/mail messages would become mh messages but nothing useful
happened.
If you are calling procmail from ~/.forward, mail may not be
left in your system mailbox
Should 'inc' manually pull in any messages in
/var/spool/mail/UID?
It should pull messages from your system mailbox and zero it.
if use -file some-mbox-file, it won't zero this file.
Thanks for any constructive suggestions. This is not a major
issue but I'm curious as to whether I am just not remembering
things correctly.
You can always run strace on Linux to see which files are
opened! On FreeBSD I see it opening ~/.mh_profile,
/usr/ocal/etc/nmh/mts.conf and /var/mail/$USER among others.
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