/var/mail/$USER read-only

[b***@gmail.com]

Hi,

on building the latest mutt from https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt.git I have one
odd problem.

My linux mail box is /var/mail/$USER, previously I had read and deleted mails
from this mailbox, now I get an error message from mutt, telling me the mailbox
is read-only.

Anyone know why this is? The permissions on /var/mail and the file itself do
allow me to write to the file.

Regards,

[hymie!]

Did you by chance leave another copy of mutt running? It might
have locked your mailbox.

Post by b***@gmail.com
Hi,
My linux mail box is /var/mail/$USER, previously I had read and deleted
mails from this mailbox, now I get an error message from mutt, telling
me the mailbox is read-only.
Anyone know why this is? The permissions on /var/mail and the file itself
do allow me to write to the file.

[Kevin J. McCarthy]

Post by b***@gmail.com
My linux mail box is /var/mail/$USER, previously I had read and deleted mails
from this mailbox, now I get an error message from mutt, telling me the mailbox
is read-only.

It may be that something is wrong with your mutt_dotlock program. Did
you configure --with-mailpath=/var/mail? What are the permissions of
/var/mail? Is your mutt_dotlock setgid?

Also you may want to check for a stale lockfile in the /var/mail
directory.

[b***@gmail.com]

Post by Kevin J. McCarthy

Post by b***@gmail.com
My linux mail box is /var/mail/$USER, previously I had read and deleted mails
from this mailbox, now I get an error message from mutt, telling me the mailbox
is read-only.

It may be that something is wrong with your mutt_dotlock program. Did
you configure --with-mailpath=/var/mail? What are the permissions of
/var/mail? Is your mutt_dotlock setgid?
Also you may want to check for a stale lockfile in the /var/mail
directory.

Hi

thanks, this prompted me to recompile and the install failed. I install as
non-root in a directory. The chgrp/setuid chmod failed on mutt_dotlock.

I'd missed the failure of install-exec-hook in my haste to recompile a couple of
days ago.

I just ran these manually with sudo, all is fixed.

Regards,