From: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!sun!megatest!fortune!hpda!hplabs!hao!seismo!harpo!utah-cs!lepreau
Newsgroups: net.sources
Title: Re: readnews and mail parse date string
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.1573
Posted: Tue May 10 22:52:16 1983
Received: Sat May 14 02:50:31 1983
References: iuvax.378

It was recommended that you do:
	readnews -c "cat % >>/usr/spool/mail/$USER"
thus mixing your news with your mail, and using your favorite
mail reader without further ado.
	DON'T!
If you directly modify your mail spool file you have bypassed
the locking which real mail manipulating pgms (are supposed to) do.
Thus you can lose mail.  (More about mail locking bogosity in a later note.)

Second warning to emacs users: it was stated that the above gives as good
an interface as the rnews.ml package.  Not so!  If you use the given method
you will use up bunches of disk space that is not used up by rnews.ml,
which only keeps an index.  The latter is much preferable if your mail
reader of choice is emacs.

-Jay Lepreau