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From: fletcher@socrates.umd.edu (Charles Fletcher)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Mail.apps bug?
Keywords: Mail.apps
Message-ID: <1991Jun05.152546.16859@socrates.umd.edu>
Date: 5 Jun 91 15:25:46 GMT
Sender: fletcher@socrates.umd.edu (Charles Fletcher)
Organization: University of Maryland, University College
Lines: 30

This is probably *NOT* a bug, but it is some strange stuff.

I recevied some NeXT mail on university account, so I transfered
it over to my NeXT (using kermit) and mv it to /usr/spool/mail/charlie.
I have done this before, so I expected no problems. Firing up Mail,
the new mail did not appear. I checked /usr/spool/mail/charlie and there it
was. So I set New Mail to manual, quit, and restarted. Sure enough, the
mail icon fanned that there was new mail. But when I clicked on new mail,
I got nothing. 

I started sending mail to myself and other users. Everyone but me would
receive the mail without problems. I checked /usr/spool/mail/charlie
(which I had now cleared out several times) and the mail was always there,
it just wasn't getting to the Mail.app. Logging in and out and rebooting did
no good.

Finally, I checked the Mailbox/Active.mbox directory and found a file 
called Copy_of_Spoolfile. An emacs examination of the file showed that
it contained my original NeXT mail message only with a Ctl-M at the end
of each line. I deleted the contents of the file and all problems went
away. Now for the strange part--I went to edit the original mail message
(to remove the Ctl-M's I thought were there) but there were no extra
Ctl characters, everything looked fine. So I again copied it into
/usr/spool/mail/charlie and fired up Mail. There it was without problems.

It is these kind of mystries that makes computing really fun. Anyone
seen anything like this before or have *ANY* guess what might have happened?

-Charlie
fletcher@socrates.umd.edu