no mail directory

[Andy Wai]

In article <16416 at watdragon.waterloo.edu> dgcasperson at violet.waterloo.edu (david Casperson) writes:
>
>One problem with this is that emacs rmail and perhaps other programs
>don't know that they are supposed to leave the spool file empty, so
>they go ahead and kill the spool file.  [...]

That's not entirely true.  The following is the code in etc/movemail.c
that closes the inbox:

#ifdef MAIL_USE_FLOCK
#if defined(STRIDE) || defined(XENIX)
  /* Stride, xenix have file locking, but no ftruncate.  This mess will do. */
  (void) close (open (inname, O_CREAT | O_TRUNC | O_RDWR, 0666));
#else
  (void) ftruncate (indesc, 0L);
#endif /* STRIDE or XENIX */
#endif /* MAIL_USE_FLOCK */
  close (indesc);

#ifndef MAIL_USE_FLOCK
  /* Delete the input file; if we can't, at least get rid of its contents.  */
  if (unlink (inname) < 0)
    if (errno != ENOENT)
      creat (inname, 0666);
  (void) unlink (lockname);
#endif /* not MAIL_USE_FLOCK */

If MAIL_USE_FLOCK is defined, then the file "inname" will get truncated.
In our case, the local sendmail doesn't use flock().  So, MAIL_USE_FLOCK
is not defined and "inname" got deleted.  I've been wondering about this,
but the choice seem quite deliberate.  That's why I never bother to change
the behavior.

I use rmail and from myself, and I realize how much of a hassle it is.  But
you can aways get from to shut up by redirecting stderr to /dev/null.

Andy