In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you write: >> Most Mail User Agents for standard Unix systems look in /var/mail/<user> >> for the user's mailbox. So if qmail is switching to ~/Mailbox, then >> they have to solve the problem for all of the various MUA's out there, >> and that is really qmail's and mutt's problem. I assume someone in that >> community must have thought about the problem, since people generally >> don't react well when they're told that they can't use their favorite >> mail reader because some new mail system has decided to use a different >> mailbox convention. >> >> So maybe any standard should not say something about the mail spool dir? > >Actually, it might be worthwhile to specify that if environment >variable MAILBOX exists, then MUAs need to honour it?
What MUAs *can't* use ~/Mailbox? The only problem I have with my computer is that each MUA (eg pine and nmh) requires seperate configuration, and doesn't look at the $MAIL environment variable. elm supports it though, mutt might, but I haven't tried it. Where does the $MAILBOX environment variable come into it? elm uses $MAIL. eg I have $MAIL=$HOME/Mailbox I don't administer large Unix systems, but I like the idea of keeping users private mail in their home directories - IMHO it makes is easier to manage when a users files are all in one location and not segragated around the entire disk structure. Also, I suspect that some people might be confusing ~/Mailbox and ~/Maildir issues. These are two completely different issues. Maildir comes from Qmail, but my guess is that ~/Mailbox didn't. Qmail has a program that will automatically convert ~/Maildir to ~/Mailbox (this is what I use). The only problem I have experienced with Maildir is that it is not possible to convert Mailbox-->Maildir and programs like login and sshd which check for new mail on login do not work --- however this is deviating from the current topic.