I posted this to the netbsd-help list yesterday, but haven't received
anything back as yet... Since I'm dealing with a stock 06/01/1997 -current
snapshot, maybe other folks have had this problem as well, and solved
it...? (Or maybe I'm just blindingly clueless, as was the case with my not
finding uucp suite binaries. Heh.)

A friend of mine suggested that maybe I need to run lockd, but that seems
to be used primarily in NFS setups, which doesn't include me. He then said
that there were a few ways files could be locked, and everything needed to
agree on the method. Since I'm using stock software, a discrepancy seems
unlikely to me... So, I'm left sans clue. Here's the message I posted:



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