Re: [nmh-workers] I Could Have Sworn that the inc Command used to work.

[Bakul Shah]

On Sat, 01 Jun 2019 09:17:16 -0500 "Martin McCormick" <address@hidden> wrote:
> I recently worked on my Debian box and mail began stacking up
> from cron jobs that were erroring out because I had temporarily
> removed the normal shell environment I use so I began getting the
> "you have new mail" message which happens when the system checks
> your mail queue as the shell prompt appears.

It's the shell that checks $MAIL (or $MAILPATH). If either is
defined, you can your system mailbox 

ls -l $MAIL # or $MAILPATH

when the shell informs you have mail.

>       I certainly can read the messages if I type mail but I
> seem to recall one can type the inc command and all those
> messages will slurp right in to nmh.

Looks like inc pays attention to $MAILDROP and if it is not
set and profile entry MailDrop is not set, it looks into
/var/mail/$USER. Not sure if it ever checks $MAIL or $MAILPATH.

>       When things are normal, procmail calls a small shell
> script that sends the bell character to all logged-in sessions
> and I put things back to normal and tried inc so all those
> /bin/mail messages would become mh messages but nothing useful
> happened.

If you are calling procmail from ~/.forward, mail may not be
left in your system mailbox
>
>       Should 'inc' manually pull in any messages in
> /var/spool/mail/UID?

It should pull messages from your system mailbox and zero it.
if use -file some-mbox-file, it won't zero this file.

> Thanks for any constructive suggestions.  This is not a major
> issue but I'm curious as to whether I am just not remembering
> things correctly.

You can always run strace on Linux to see which files are
opened!  On FreeBSD I see it opening ~/.mh_profile,
/usr/ocal/etc/nmh/mts.conf and /var/mail/$USER among others.