I'm running a fairly plain-vanilla NetBSD 1.2 system (Mac68K, 06/01/1997
-current snapshot) and I'm having some trouble with mail.

In the following example, I seemed to successfully delete a bit of mail,
but on quitting I get the "Unable to lock mailbox: Permission denied"
message, and when I run mail again, the message I deleted is back and not
marked as being read.

	& h
	>   1 mason                 Sun Jul 13 20:31  23/847   "testing 2"
	& d 1
	& h
	No applicable messages
	& q
	Unable to lock mailbox: Permission denied
	mason$ mail
	Mail version 8.1 6/6/93.  Type ? for help.
	"/var/mail/mason": 1 message 1 new
	>N  1 mason                 Sun Jul 13 20:31  23/847   "testing 2"
	& d 1
	& q
	Unable to lock mailbox: Permission denied
	mason$

Also, when I try elm (version 2.4 PL25), it tells me:

	Waiting to read mailbox while mail is being received: attempt #1

and then, after a number of tries:

	Giving up after 7 iterations.

	Please try to read your mail again in a few minutes.

I'm not sure why this is all happening... I'd love some advice! I haven't
changed anything that I'm aware of in the mail system... The mailbox files
seem to be owned properly:

	mason$ cd /var/mail
	mason$ ll
	total 25
	-rw-------  1 mason  wheel    847 Jul 13 20:31 mason
	-rw-------  1 root   wheel  24390 Jul 14 02:08 root
	mason$

The other odd thing is that I can't seem to delete the file manually... The
/var/mail directory is rwxr-xr-x. When I change it to be world-writable,
the problem with 'mail' goes away, but the problem with 'elm' remains.
However, if the directory was initially not world-readable, then I don't
want to make it world-readable anyway, do I? I'm going to assume that
making the directory world-writable is *not* my solution, at least until I
hear otherwise.

Thank you in advance for the help.

--
        Mason Loring Bliss    /\    mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us
      PGPKeyID: 0x25B3D5B5   /()\   awake ? sleep() : dream();
<barbaric>YAWP!</barbaric>  /    \  http://genesis.tiac.net/~mason