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Path: utzoo!linus!faron!sidney
From: sidney@faron.UUCP (Sidney Markowitz)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: Question about GNU Emacs rmail
Message-ID: <357@faron.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 26-Sep-85 09:57:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: faron.357
Posted: Thu Sep 26 09:57:13 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Sep-85 07:39:12 EDT
References: <365@eneevax.UUCP> <3746@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Reply-To: sidney@faron.UUCP (Sidney Markowitz)
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, MA
Lines: 33

In article <3746@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> vijay@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (P. Vijay) writes:
>> 
>> When I try to execute rmail by typing ``M-x rmail'', the cursor goes
>> back to the beginning of the mini-buffer and just stays there and
>> everything seems dead.  As soon as I type ``C-g'', It says something
   [ ... ]
>
>the last time you read it. Thus, 'movemail' must be setgid'ed to the
>group 'mail', (the group that /usr/spool/mail belongs to). While you

There is a bug in movemail.c that causes it to hang up when it does
not have write access to the mail spool directory (/usr/spool/mail),
rather than produce an error message. That's why everything goes dead,
but fixing that still won't let you read your mail.

Our installation write protects /usr/spool/mail, does not put it in
group "mail", and apparently the powers that be do not want to change
that situation. What we have done is to make /usr/spool/mail/$USER a
directory owned by $USER, and so the mail spool file is
/usr/spool/mail/$USER/$USER. The mailer programs already check for
that situation (at least in 4.2 BSD). I submitted the rmail.el fixes
to handle that to bug-gnu-emacs quite a while ago, but since I
installed them here myself I didn't check whether they were
incorporated into the distribution files. So if your system
administrator does not want to use setguid to give movemail write
access to /usr/spool/mail, than have her/him change your mail spool
file to /usr/spool/mail/$USER/$USER.

-- 
					Sidney Markowitz

ARPA:	sidney@mitre-bedford
UUCP:	...{allegra,decvax,genrad,ihnp4,philabs,security,utzoo}!linus!sidney


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