Re: mail command deletes all mail?

[Rob <bringman@dog-slow.org>]

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