Please can somebody help me with an internal Mailing problem.
SuSE 64bit 11.2
Avira AntiVirus
Alpine & Pine Mailing Client.
For a few short months system mail was being read with Alpine, then for a short while i wasn’t getting any mail!
When cron jobs run and when Avira updates mail is being sent to root@localhost and placed in the location:
/var/spool/mail/UserName
My Mailing client opens mail stored in the location:
/home/UserName/Maildir
Not sure just what has altered / changed, tried to alter where Alpine gets its mail from and failed. I don’t know which location is the correct location for the mail thats being generated by the system, cron jobs or Avira Updates.
How do i rectify my problem so that i can get my mail thats generated by the system, cron jobs and Avira in future.
Those two locations correspond to two formats for mailboxs, /var/spool/mail/<user> is used by the mbox format, and /home/<user>/Maildir is used by the maildir format.
Postfix delivers in either format and you can select maildir format by the setting
home_mailbox = Maildir/
in mail.cf.
It’s not clear how you are fetching mail with alpine, whether you are using IMAP or reading mbox directly (I don’t even remember if alpine handles mbox). If you are using IMAP, then dovecot handles both formats, but may have to be told where the directory is. The setting is:
mail_location
in dovecot.conf
So you have to adjust either postfix or dovecot.
Another possibility is when you are using procmail to deliver. In this case it doesn’t matter what postfix is set to do, because it’s procmail’s setting that determines where the mail ends up.
On Install of SuSE 11.2 i commenced using pine (now Alpine) for reading / getting system mail and it just worked as it did when i was using SuSE 9. I had nothing to do or configure it just started getting system mail as expected and as i was always used to by default.
Sorry main.cf. But if you have been editing postfix’s config via YaST, then you should continue to do that, and use POSTFIX_ADD_HOME_MAILBOX=Maildir/ as an additional item in postfix’s config.
Maybe you should just forward root’s mail to your normal mailbox elsewhere.
Rather than looking for when the update happened (and then what, will you install an older version?), why not go forward and configure either alpine or postfix to match each other? Alpine’s maildrop is configured under Inbox path. From the initial screen you can enter Setup.
But to answer your question, rpm -qa --last gives a reverse time-sorted list of packages installed.
I thought was that if i new which application caused the problem then i could contentrate my efforts on that application to put right whats gone wrong in some way.
Tried to configure Alpine but failed, it asks me for a server.
No idea what to enter, if i enter /var/spool/mail/UserName it fails.
an additional option appears to be to select Mail Drop, no idea what this is either.
I’m very grate full for all the help i’m getting, i am, but telling me what to do without telling how to do it isn’t that helpful as much as i am thankful for all your help.
I haven’t got a clue what i’m doing or how to get things done, the more i fumble around trying the deeper the hole i get myself into.
I am making notes so i can undo things, but i’m just getting lost with it all.
I am grate full but telling me what to do without some guidance as to how to do it isn’t too helpful even after googling it.
So many Linux distro’s with different ways of doing things.
The command rpm -qa --last tells me that the last set of updates were installed on the 3rd Feb which is incorrect because i’ve installed several updates since then.
The box hasn’t been rebooted for weeks though if this makes a difference to the results from the command offered.
rpm -qa --last shows you the last install time of all packages, not just updates, FYI. Make sure you are running it on the right machine.
The reason I can’t be of more assistance is that there are a thousand and one ways to arrange email and I don’t know how your machine is configured. I’ve configured mine to my liking, but it’s highly unlikely to look like yours. FYI, I have the whole disaster:
postfix + procmail + dovecot + thunderbird + alpine as well as postfix directives to forward to gmail for gmail.com sender addresses and my ISP for all else.
I only have the one Linux box running 64bit SuSE 11.2.
I know that i have installed several updates since the 3rd feb, 4 items were installed only yesterday. Checked my system time and that’s correct
All mailing application settings and configs are as they were installed by default on install of the OS unless they have been altered by an update since.
I haven’t knowingly made any alterations to postfix, Alpine or any other system setting whatsoever that could of changed any of these mailing settings until i realized i had a problem.
Having made changes that failed to resolve my problem i then returned these changes back to there original settings / values.
All i want to do is occasionally use alpine to see if i have any mail generated by the system that requires attention.
The system is generating mail that’s being sent to /var/spool/mail/UserName but it’s no longer being made available for me to read via alpine anymore.
I’ve googled how to change alpines mailbox location / path on the file system and failed to find an answer that has worked.