when reading mail from the command line I get eg: 29 $ mail Mail version 8.1.1-11 6/6/93. Type ? for help. "/var/mail/ian": 1 message 1 new >N 1 localian@tweek.thepo Tue Sep 17 14:07 17/591 "hello12" & Message 1: From localian@tweek.thepond Tue Sep 17 14:07:39 2002 Delivered-To: ian@sparky.thepond To: ian@sparky.thepond Subject: hello12 From: localian@tweek.thepond Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 14:07:04 +0100 hello 12 & q mail: Cannot create lockfile /var/mail/ian.lock: Error creating temporary lockfile This is my mail dir. Have I messed up, or is it Gentoo? 30 $ ll /var/mail total 20 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 09-17 14:11 ./ drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4096 09-09 21:50 ../ -rw------- 1 ian users 9555 09-17 14:11 ian -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 06-29 13:30 .keep Should the perms be 1777 ? I don't want to do this without "official clearance" because it looks very much like a DOS issue . . .
/var/mail (check that it is not a symlink to /var/spool/mail), should belong to the "mail" group, and have rw permissions for group: # chown root.mail /var/spool/mail # chmod 775 /var/spool/mail
Thanks - it was root:root 755 on my system for some reason . . .
Think it could be a small portage bug which I also just picked up with tetex.
This is actually a "portage feature", talk to Daniel (drobbins) or Nick (carpaski) for more info. Anyhow, mailbase mailbase-0.00-r5 should fix the perms in pkg_postinst() ...
