Hello again A little while back I installed archivemail on Jessie, to delete mail from my local mailbox when it is more than a month old.
The command I am running is: archivemail --output-dir=/home/mark/Mail/ -d 31 --delete /var/mail/mark My mailbox is in /var/mail/mark. I didn't choose to put it there, that is where it went when the system was installed. I am not sure if that is thanks to the default settings of exim4, mutt, or something else. Now /var/mail is owned by root:mail and had access 775. /var/mail/mark is owned by mark:mail and has permissions 660. Whenever I ran archivemail as mark, it was complaining that it did not have write access to /var/mail (it wanted to write a lock file) and then proceeded to say it was deleting 0 messages. The oldest messages in my mail folder are dated September 18th and as such should have been deleted by now. They are not being because, I suppose, of the failure to write the lock file. When I run archivemail as root it complains that I am not the owner of the mailbox and refuses to do anything. It seems that if the mailbox is in the default out-of-the-box place then archivemail can't use it properly. It seems like archivemail is expecting my mailbox (its input) to be in a folder to which I will have write access. It seems to me that a package should ship with default assumptions that can be met by the other packages in the distro. Now, I have got away from the error by making /var/mail world-writable, but I don't like that solution. Is there a better one? Will I have to move my mailbox to a different location, eg my home directory, and if so how do I safely do that in a way that won't break anything (I am using exim4 and mutt and I don't know what other infrastructure might be involved that would care, for example I keep hearing about something called procmail but don't know if that is actually involved in handling mail on my system) And if it is necessary to move my mailbox, why does its location default the way it does? Seems to me that if that is the default location, I ought to be able to get things to work there. Throughout, mail delivery using exim4, and reading using mutt, is working fine. Any thoughts? One thought I've just had is I could add my "mark" user id to the "mail" group, if I could remember how to do that (I see a Google in my future), which would allow my user id to write to /var/mail since the directory was group writable -- but if that is the right answer why wasn't that done by package installation? Is there a gotcha with doing that? Mark