I've spent the entire yesterday evening searching and puzzling over this.
Here's what I found sofar:
> ----------
> From: David Boyce[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: 10 June 1999 12:15
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: You have new mail - NOT!
>
> Maurice Hendrix writes:
> >I've already received and read mail (using pine) from a local user
> >and from cron. With no problems. 'mail' is not installed. I installed
> >'pine', so I figured I wouldn't need to install 'mail'.
>
> It's not clear to me that you have actually tried to do as I
> suggested. Is your assertion that 'mail is not installed' on the
> basis that you have tried to run it and got "mail: command not found",
> or on the basis that you haven't knowingly installed it?
>
# mail
bash: mail: command not found
I knowingly did *not* install mail. SuSE 6.1 allows this. As I said I
installed 'pine' instead of 'mail'.
> Naturally it is wise to be wary of running unfamiliar commands as
> root, which is why I suggested reading 'man mail' first. This should
> be among your man pages in section 1.
>
I compared 'man mail' and 'man pine'. They both use the same
(/var/spool/mail/<user>) for incoming mail. As said before I have received
and read mail from 'cron' other users with no problems.
> Let me try to explain more clearly.
>
> The message "You have new mail." is (almost certainly) being generated
> as a result of a test being made in /etc/profile (but perhaps in
> /root/.profile ). If you look in there, I expect you will find
> something like
>
> /bin/mail -e
> case $? in
>
> 0)
> echo "You have new mail."
> ;;
>
> ...
>
> esac
>
This *really* took me a long time, but I found out that the message is
generated by /bin/login (ELF binary). I'm assuming that /bin/login will
check /var/spool/mail/<user> to see if the file is bigger than 0 bytes and
then reports "You have mail." if it is.
I looked in /var/spool/mail there is a file called root. It is approx. 540
bytes. I think this triggers the message. But in 'pine' I don't see the
message. So, here is the contents of the file (I think you'll see why 'pine'
doesn't show me this):
+-----8<------
| From MAILER-DAEMON Mon Jun 7 19:40:46 1999
| Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 19:40:46 +0200 (CEST)
| From: Mail System Internal Data <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA
| X-IMAP: 0928696257 0000000002
| Status: RO
|
| This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not
| a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software.
| If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created
| with the data reset to initial values.
|
+----->8---
Is it safe to delete this , contrary to what the message says? Which program
made this? I've not seen this on previous installations of Linux. How can I
get rid of this (clearly) erroneous "You have mail." message?
--
Maurice Hendrix
