1) It has mail:root instead of root:mail 2) the group is not writeable, therefore a common user gets an error the the lock file could not be created in /var/spool/mail tested yesterday with a stage 3 build and sendmail 8.14.9
Please post the URL to the stage3 image you used.
errm, did is yesterday night .... the stage is n22kvm ~ # ls -l /stage3-i686-20140812.tar.bz2* -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 176713113 Aug 15 23:38 /stage3-i686-20140812.tar.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4479350 Aug 15 23:42 /stage3-i686-20140812.tar.bz2.CONTENTS.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1582 Aug 15 23:43 /stage3-i686-20140812.tar.bz2.DIGESTS.asc -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 716 Aug 15 23:42 /stage3-i686-20140812.tar.bz2.DIGESTS.bz2
I downloaded that stage3 tarball just now and it doesn't in fact install /var/spool/mail at all - that should be singularly owned by net-mail/mailbase. The mailbase ebuilds invariably call `fowners root:mail /var/spool/mail'.
Hhm, I installed a KVM following strictly the handbook. Then I emerged mailx and sendmail (well, not with USE flag mbox, I forgot it), so I rebuilt all with that USE flag. Now I made the first usual tests (still in chroot, KVM was not booted the first time with its own kernel): I run "date | mail -s fromR tfoerste" as root and "date | mail -s fromT root" where tfoerste is the unprivileged user to check mail sending itself and run as every user "mail" to see, if I can read the mail and delete it. That's why I stumbled over this issue.
