From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Sep 24 13:21:11 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id NAA05067 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Thu, 24 Sep 1998 13:21:11 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from pau-amma.whistle.com (s205m64.whistle.com [207.76.205.64]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA05052 for ; Thu, 24 Sep 1998 13:21:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dhw@whistle.com) Received: (from dhw@localhost) by pau-amma.whistle.com (8.8.8/8.8.7) id NAA01615; Thu, 24 Sep 1998 13:21:04 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dhw) Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 13:21:04 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill Message-Id: <199809242021.NAA01615@pau-amma.whistle.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, jbarker1842@my-dejanews.com, scott@dcs.qmw.ac.uk Subject: Re: sendmail losing mail In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 11:27:41 -0700 >From: "Jim Barker" >>Well, unless you've done something weird, mail is locally delivered into >>/var/mail/$USER. Did you try running 'mail'? >I did not see any subdirectories under /var/mail, such as jimbark. >I did try to run mail, but it said I had no mail. >More appropiately "jimbark has no mail". Assuming you're using the usual UNIX "local mail delivery agent" (as your configuration (which I elided) showed, and which is /usr/libexec/mail.local in FreeBSD-2.2), the objects in /var/mail are simple files (rather than directories), in "UNIX mailbox" format. In this format, a given mailbox is a file that consists of messages concatenated together; the beginning of a new message is indicated by the existence of a line matching the pattern /^From /. The usual mail "client programs" (or "MUAs"), as well as the usual POP servers, can generally read this format without jumping through hoops. david -- David Wolfskill UNIX System Administrator dhw@whistle.com voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (650) 371-4621 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message