mike@penguin.gatech.edu (Mike Gourlay) (12/18/90)
Hi, Sometimes when mail comes to me, the file /usr/mail/mike will already exist, and have the mode -rw-r---- which means that the mail group can not write to the file. What happens is that the mailer tries to save the message, and can not, so the mail does not get written. The worst thing is that the mail does not bounce; The mailer thinks everything went smoothly, and biff tells my that I have new mail. The message is not there, and I have no way of finding out what the message was, who sent it, or anything. I lose a lot of mail this way. I've lost at least a dozen messages, and who knows how much more when I'm not around to see biff puke up the eaten message. My temporary fix is to delete the badly chmod'ed file, so that mail can create a new one with -rw-rw---- permissions. That does not recover my lost mail, and invariably, it happens again and again eating more mail. I know that I've seen some fixes for a couple of HP things, but I don't recall seeing a fix for this. I can't imagine that I'm the only one who has seen this unless I'm doing something weird. Is this common? Is it my fault, or HP's? How do I fix it? Thanks yet again for help with my HP, Mike Gourlay mike@penguin.gatech.edu