Maurice Hendrix writes:
>I've spent the entire yesterday evening searching and puzzling over this.
>Here's what I found sofar:
>I knowingly did *not* install mail. SuSE 6.1 allows this. As I said I
>installed 'pine' instead of 'mail'.
Ah. I wasn't aware SuSE permitted this. I underestimated your level
of expertise; I apologise.
>> The message "You have new mail." is (almost certainly) being generated
I am SO glad I wrote 'almost' :)
>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.
With Pascal's input, I agree. It doesn't quite tally with your
previous report about "You have new mail.", but maybe a peek in the
source for login would clarify that (perhaps it knows more about the
content of the mailbox than simply its size).
> 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?
It does not look safe to delete this yet. From its appearance, the
"important folder data" referred to are the numbers following the
X-IMAP: header, which implies that the folder is being managed by an
IMAP server. You would only delete it if you were sure you don't use
IMAP for anything to do with root.
>Which program made this?
I can't answer for sure, but I assume that there is an IMAP message
store somewhere (it could be on a remote system if the folder is
mounted on NFS). See below for more comments.
>I've not seen this on previous installations of Linux. How can I
>get rid of this (clearly) erroneous "You have mail." message?
You will have seen Pascal's response concerning this, which may or may
not be a satisfactory solution, depending on how you feel about not
having your 'last login time' displayed (IMO, a useful security
feature).
I hesitate to suggest this (although what's the point in having source
otherwise?), but you could try patching the login command to behave
differently (e.g. disable the mailfile size check in the code while
still performing the other checks), and maybe add something to
/etc/profile to check for 'real' new mail.
Finally, you might like to consider whether you need any IMAP
information in the folder at all. If you don't, then it might be
useful to check your local mail delivery mechanisms to see whether
they are IMAP-based. If your local MTA is sendmail, then you should be
able to determine the local delivery program being used
(e.g. "mail.local", although that isn't an IMAP delivery agent) by
examining the the sendmail.cf file or the m4 source from which it is
derived. Then you might be in a better position to decide what to do
next.
David.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
