Re: mail command deletes all mail?

[Chuck Yerkes <chuck+obsd@2003.snew.com>]

You might also ponder using a mail reader that was
written after 1984.  elm, pine, mutt leap to mind
along with about 40,000 others.

mail is useful iff you have a tty device and want
to save paper.

Quoting Marcus Watts (mdw@umich.edu):
> > Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 09:12:59 -0500
> > From: Rob <rbb-obsd@dog-slow.org>
> > To: misc@openbsd.org
> > Subject: mail command deletes all mail?
> > Message-ID: <20030401141259.GA56456@ringo.dog-slow.org>
> > Mime-Version: 1.0
> > 
> > OK, this befuddles me completely.  Is this proper behavior for the 
> > mail command?
> > 
> > $ echo $MAIL
> > /home/bringman/mbox
> > $ ls -al /home/bringman/mbox
> > ls: /home/bringman/mbox: No such file or directory
> > $ mail bringman
> > Subject: testing
> > alsjkdf
> > .
> > EOT
> > $ ls -al /home/bringman/mbox
> > -rw-------  1 bringman  users  429 Apr  1 09:23 /home/bringman/mbox
> > $ mail
> > Mail version 8.1.2 01/15/2001.  Type ? for help.
> > "/home/bringman/mbox": 1 message 1 new
> > >N  1 bringman@red.insi  Tue Apr 01 14:22   12/429   testing
> > & 1
> > Message 1:
> > >From bringman@red.inside.dog-slow.org Tue Apr 01 14:22:50 2003
> > Delivered-To: bringman@red.inside.dog-slow.org
> > From: bringman@red.inside.dog-slow.org
> > To: bringman@red.inside.dog-slow.org
> > Subject: testing
> > 
> > alsjkdf
> > 
> > & q
> > Saved 1 message in mbox
> > $ ls -al /home/bringman/mbox
> > ls: /home/bringman/mbox: No such file or directory
> > $
> > 
> > 
> > What happend to my mailbox?
> > 
> > -- 
> > Rob
> > 
> > 
> 
> 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