[Mageia-discuss] Problems with Local Mail

[James Kerr]

On 25/06/2012 11:36, Anne Wilson wrote:
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> Plain M2 :-)  Every time I started Thunderbird I got a message that it
> couldn't locate the local mail spool (can't remember the exact words).
>   Assuming it meant /var/spool/mail/anne, I touched that, owned
> anne:mail (I tried root, too), but now the message is "Unable to
> truncate spool file /var/spool/mail/anne".
>
> I don't have the problem on the Cauldron netbook, so I checked there,
> and there is no /var/spool/mail/anne - so I guess something has
> changed wrt local mail.  Are we now talking about
> ~/.local/share/local-mail/ ?  What do I need to do now?
>

I don't have this problem. I use postfix to deliver system mails to 
/var/spool/mail/jim. (I don't use it for any other purpose.) Thunderbird 
collects those and stores them in
~/.thunderbird/xxx.default/Mail/localhost/inbox (where xxx is an 
alphanumeric string). /var/spool/mail/jim is owned by jim.

The process is the same on both my Mageia2 and cauldron installations.

That error message suggests to me that there is something about the file 
in /var/spool/mail/anne that is not what thunderbird expects, but I've 
no idea what that might be. The only thought I have is that for some 
reason that file is read only instead of read/write.

Jim