Am Donnerstag, 28. Oktober 2021, 15:38:34 CEST schrieb Greg Wooledge: Hi Greg,
of course I can. This is step-by-step what I do: Starting mutt from the commandline as normal user. Mutt in ncurses appears. Now I want to mark and delete all mails. I press Shift+D, then it asks the for the sample and I press . (dot) and * (asterix). By pressing the "Enter" key all mails are marked ND+. Now pressing "q" (for quit) and it asks me "20 as deletion marked mails delete? ([yes]/no):" (Note, I have a German environment, so it asks me in German. This sentence a translated by me). I answer yes, and it appears "temporary file could not be created". Pressing again "q" and now answer "no", mutt closes. Does this help? Best regards Hans > On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 03:21:47PM +0200, Hans wrote: > > Hi folks, > > > > I got into an issue with mutt. Problem is, mutt can not delete mails and I > > myself can not delete the file below /var/mail/. > > You are not *supposed* to delete your entire inbox file. You're only > supposed to modify it, potentially reducing the size of it to 0 bytes. > > That said, I've been using $HOME/Maildir/ for decades, so I don't know > how Debian currently manages the /var/mail/* mbox files that it defaults > to. /usr/bin/mutt_dotlock is setgid mail on my system, the same as > on yours. /var/mail is writable by group mail (same as yours), so that > appears to be OK. > > Can you give us more details? E.g. describe how you delete a single > message from your inbox in mutt, and exactly what mutt does when you > try it.