Read-only /var/spool/mail problems

Duane Morin dmorin at morinfamily.com
Sat Apr 21 08:34:59 EDT 2001


We only use Linux at my house.  My wife needs a nice simple email program that
will allow her to see the various HTML and image attachments that people send
her.  Thus far I've been using Balsa, and happy with it.  The problem?  Balsa
seems very sensitive to the rights on /var/spool/mail.  You need to have it 
be world writeable in order for her to manage her mail (i.e. delete from her
inbox).  Even if I change this, then periodically root comes along and changes
it back and she gets all confused.

Any suggestions on how to get around this?  I don't have the problem personally
because I use exmh and have to hit a specific button to get my mail, which 
copies /var/spool/mail/xxxx to a local mbox directory and I can do whatever I
want.  But I don't think she'd love the exmh interface.

Duane


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