From: <[email protected]> 75Date: Thu, 6 Oct 88 22:50:53 EDT
From: Alan Bawden <[email protected]>
To: SUN-BUGS
Cc: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: I have mail?Whenever log into a Sun, I am told that I have mail. I don’t want to
receive mail on a Unix, I want my mail to be forwarded to
“Alan@AI.” Now as near as I can tell, I don’t have a mailbox in my
home directory on the Suns, but perhaps Unix keeps mailboxes else-
where? If I send a test message to “alan@wheaties” it correctly finds
its way to AI, just as the .forward file in my home directory says to
do. I also have the mail-address field in my inquir entry set to
“Alan@AI.” Nevertheless, whenever I log into a Sun, it tells me that
I have mail. (I don’t have a personal entry in the aliases file, do I
need one of those in addition to the .forward file and the inquir
entry?)So could someone either:A. Tell me that I should just ignore the “You have mail”
message, because in fact I don't have any mail accumulating in
some dark corner of the file system, orB. Find that mail and forward it to me, and fix it so that this
never happens again.Thanks.The next day, Alan answered his own query:
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 88 14:44 EDT
From: Alan Bawden <[email protected]>
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: I have mail?Date: Thu, 6 Oct 88 22:50:53 EDT
From: Alan Bawden <[email protected]>... (I don’t have a personal entry in the aliases file, do I need
one of those in addition to the .forward file and the inquir
entry?) ...Apparently the answer to this is “yes.” If the file server that contains
your home directory is down, the mailer can’t find your .forward file,