s-nail fails with "Unable to (dot) lock mailbox, aborting operation: Permission denied"

[Rick Thomas]

With recent Stretch installations the “mail” (or “mailx”) command is satisfied 
by the s-nail package.
As it comes fresh out of the box, s-nail has a problem with dotlock files.  For 
example:

> rbthomas@half:~$ mail
> Creating dotlock for "/var/mail/rbthomas" .
> Unable to (dot) lock mailbox, aborting operation: Permission denied
> Creating dotlock for "/var/mail/rbthomas" .
> Unable to (dot) lock mailbox, aborting operation: Permission denied
> rbthomas@half:~$ 

I don’t know if this is deliberate, or even whether this is the right fix, but 
the error can be made to go away by doing:

> sudo chown root:mail /usr/lib/s-nail/s-nail-privsep
> sudo chmod g+s /usr/lib/s-nail/s-nail-privsep

If the consensus is that it’s a bug, not a feature, I’ll submit a bug report.  
I guess s-nail is the appropriate package?

Enjoy!
Rick

Re: s-nail fails with "Unable to (dot) lock mailbox, aborting operation: Permission denied"

[Rick Thomas]

On Dec 28, 2015, at 2:31 AM, Rick Thomas  wrote:

> With recent Stretch installations the “mail” (or “mailx”) command is 
> satisfied by the s-nail package.
> As it comes fresh out of the box, s-nail has a problem with dotlock files.  
> For example:
> 
>> rbthomas@half:~$ mail
>> Creating dotlock for "/var/mail/rbthomas" .
>> Unable to (dot) lock mailbox, aborting operation: Permission denied
>> Creating dotlock for "/var/mail/rbthomas" .
>> Unable to (dot) lock mailbox, aborting operation: Permission denied
>> rbthomas@half:~$ 
> 
> I don’t know if this is deliberate, or even whether this is the right fix, 
> but the error can be made to go away by doing:
> 
>> sudo chown root:mail /usr/lib/s-nail/s-nail-privsep
>> sudo chmod g+s /usr/lib/s-nail/s-nail-privsep
> 
> If the consensus is that it’s a bug, not a feature, I’ll submit a bug report. 
>  I guess s-nail is the appropriate package?
> 
> Enjoy!
> Rick

Turns out, that this is bug #806858.

Rick