Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob
From: bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Re: need help on rmail
Message-ID: <28174@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 22 Nov 88 15:36:59 GMT
References: <8811211920.AA29950@prep.ai.mit.edu> <26915@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Distribution: gnu
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science
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In article <26915@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> sarvind@janus.UUCP (Arvind Srinivasan) writes:
>When I invoke rmail, emacs gives me an error in the minibuffer which reads:-
>  movemail: unable to create lock file
>The same message appears when I try to get new mail from rmail mode.
>Do I need write access to /usr/spool/mail or is there a way to get
>around this ?

Here's an excerpt from our top-level Makefile:

|install: mkdir lockdir
|...
|	install -c -s -g mail -m 2755 etc/movemail ${LIBDIR}/etc/movemail

Our /usr/spool/mail is protected like:

drwxrwxr-x  2 root     mail        24576 Nov 22 10:23 mail

That is, movemail must be setgid so that it can write in
/usr/spool/mail to create the lock file.  Our rmail users (of which
I'm not an example) complain quickly every time I forget this...