On 31 May 1999, Peter Simons+mail.list.netbsd.port-i386 wrote:

> My NetBSD 1.4 keeps confusing me. When I receive e-mail to my normal
> mailbox, the mailbox is created being group readable and writable 
> 
>  | root@peti:/var/mail# ls -la
>  | total 10
>  | drwxr-xr-x   2 root    wheel   512 May 31 10:09 .
>  | drwxr-xr-x  19 root    wheel   512 May 28 14:23 ..
>  | -rw-rw----   1 simons  wheel  2457 May 31 10:09 simons
> 
> and I have no idea why. Anyone else?

/var/mail should have the sticky bit set:

fredb-> ls -al /var/mail
total 2
drwxrwxrwt   2 root   wheel  512 May 31 03:51 .
drwxr-xr-x  20 root   wheel  512 May  5 07:48 ..
-rw-------   1 fredb  fredb    0 May 31 03:51 fredb

It might not be a bad idea to run mtree over /. The following is the
invocation used by "make build":

mtree -def mtree/NetBSD.dist -p // -u

Other options are possible. Beware of '-r', which will remove every
file on your system that wasn't part of the distribution.