A h/w failure resulted in a mail semi-outage. A secondary spool caught mail that didn't hit primary, but overlaps with deleted mail etc. etc.
Hence the goal posted. Installing a compiler to compile the latest XEmacs to run the lasted VM in to sort the mailspool didn't strike me at the time as the fastest way to get the mail sorted. I didn't care if XEmacs 21.1.3 wasn't the latest and greatest, or for that matter, vm 8.09. Googling sort mbox mail file produced similar queries for similar reasons for which someone posted vm as the solution. That's why I downloaded a pre-compiled binary, rather than install gcc and compile XEmacs from source. Sorting the mail is my goal rather than equipping myself with compilers and latest Emacs-based text editor.
