On Sat, 01 Jun 2019 09:17:16 -0500 "Martin McCormick" <marti...@suddenlink.net> wrote: > I recently worked on my Debian box and mail began stacking up > from cron jobs that were erroring out because I had temporarily > removed the normal shell environment I use so I began getting the > "you have new mail" message which happens when the system checks > your mail queue as the shell prompt appears.
It's the shell that checks $MAIL (or $MAILPATH). If either is defined, you can your system mailbox ls -l $MAIL # or $MAILPATH when the shell informs you have mail. > I certainly can read the messages if I type mail but I > seem to recall one can type the inc command and all those > messages will slurp right in to nmh. Looks like inc pays attention to $MAILDROP and if it is not set and profile entry MailDrop is not set, it looks into /var/mail/$USER. Not sure if it ever checks $MAIL or $MAILPATH. > When things are normal, procmail calls a small shell > script that sends the bell character to all logged-in sessions > and I put things back to normal and tried inc so all those > /bin/mail messages would become mh messages but nothing useful > happened. If you are calling procmail from ~/.forward, mail may not be left in your system mailbox > > Should 'inc' manually pull in any messages in > /var/spool/mail/UID? It should pull messages from your system mailbox and zero it. if use -file some-mbox-file, it won't zero this file. > Thanks for any constructive suggestions. This is not a major > issue but I'm curious as to whether I am just not remembering > things correctly. You can always run strace on Linux to see which files are opened! On FreeBSD I see it opening ~/.mh_profile, /usr/ocal/etc/nmh/mts.conf and /var/mail/$USER among others. -- nmh-workers https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers