[Mageia-discuss] Problems with Local Mail

[James Kerr]

On 25/06/2012 15:43, Anne Wilson wrote:
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> On 25/06/12 11:55, Doug Laidlaw wrote:
>> On Mon, 25 Jun 2012 11:36:56 +0100 Anne Wilson <annew at kde.org>
>> 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?
>>>
>>> Anne - --
>> /var/spool/mail/anne is the system mailbox for user anne.
>> Thunderbird will be putting your mail somewhere else.  I suspect
>> that it will be a dot-directory under /home/anne, perhaps a
>> subdirectory of your .mozilla directory.
>>
>> I think that TB uses the mbox file format.  That means that your
>> inbox will be one big file.  Perhaps TB is trying to delete the
>> old mails, hence "truncate."
>>
> That makes sense, yes.  I had assumed that it was talking about system
> messages, which I would expect to be in /var/spool/mail/anne.
>

System messages will be in /var/spool/mail/anne, only if your MTA is 
configured to deliver them there. Otherwise, IIRC, they end up in /.

Jim