Subject: Tenex mailbox

From: Dave Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 06:50:35 -0700 (PDT)

I have created the mail.txt file in $HOME.  After restarting Pine, it 
never gets filled with the IN mail.  The in mail stays in 
/usr/spool/mail/dave.  Could my version be "hacked" to prevent tenex support?

-Dave Hansen
[email-masked]

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From: Clifford Wesley Fulford <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 16:12:45 +0100 (BST)

Hi Dave
Regards to Lana.

> /usr/spool/mail/dave.  Could my version be "hacked" to prevent tenex support?

I tried this just now under solaris 2.4. The mail was transfered ok to
what I assume is tenex format in $HOME/mail.txt, but on trying to exit
pine appeared to hang. After 5 minutes or so I killed the process and 
tried restarting. It hung again. I moved mail.txt to another filename in 
my main folder collection, expecting to have to edit it back at some 
stage to an ordinary mail file, but I find it loads happily into pine 
as part of a folder collection (although not of course into mail or 
mailx). So whats going wrong when it tries to use it as the inbox?
Clifford

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From: Dave Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 09:42:09 -0700 (PDT)

That was it!  My config file had /usr/spool/mail/dave.  Then I got 
permission probs so I set mail.txt to 660 owned by dave.  Works great!

-Dave

On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, Mark Crispin wrote:

> On 24 Oct 1995, Dave Hansen wrote:
> It's possible, but first check the following:
> 	1) make sure that mail.txt is empty (0 bytes) and doesn't have
> 	   any spurious whitespace or newlines.
> 	2) make sure "inbox-path" in .pinerc is set to INBOX, and not
> 	   to /usr/spool/mail/dave
> 
> -- Mark --
> 
> DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
> Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
> 
> 
>

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 09:17:30 -0700

-- Mark --

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 09:24:16 -0700

> mailx). So whats going wrong when it tries to use it as the inbox?

Is your home directory and/or /tmp NFS mounted?

mail.txt is accessed through random access update mode, which doesn't have
a prayer of working reliably via NFS.  Worse, on SVR4 (which Solaris is),
you have the infamous rpc.lockd and rpc.statd daemons to contend with.
I'm willing to be that that is what caused your hangs.

If NFS rears its ugly head anywhere in this picture, you're probably
better off not using tenex format.  You need a filesystem which implements
complete UNIX filesystem semantics.  NFS comes close, but not quite.

-- Mark --