One last followup, in case anyone researching something similar notices he same semi-problem....
David Guntner grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
>
> Found the section in /etc/pam.d/login (and the corresponding one in
> /etc/pam.d/su) which reads:
>
> # Prints the status of the user's mailbox upon succesful login
> # (Replaces the `MAIL_CHECK_ENAB' option from login.defs).
> #
> # This also defines the MAIL environment variable
> # However, userdel also needs MAIL_DIR and MAIL_FILE variables
> # in /etc/login.defs to make sure that removing a user
> # also removes the user's mail spool file.
> # See comments in /etc/login.defs
> session optional pam_mail.so standard
>
> Read up on "man pam_mail" and found what needs to be changed there to
> point it to the right directory within a user's home directory and
> tested it. $MAIL now points where it should - w00t! :-)
Well, it works, *almost* perfectly. If I login via SSH or on the
console in a virtual terminal (alt-F1, etc.), it works just fine. But
for some reason, if I login directly via the GUI login manager (I'm
using KDE; don't know if Gnome does this or not), then the $MAIL
variable ends up completely empty. It's probably been doing this all
along and I just never noticed it until I had made the change to Maildir
and started looking around. If I open up any kind of shell window
within the GUI that was logged into, doing an "echo $MAIL" brings back
an empty response. I can actually go so far as to do a
su - {myself}
and then an "echo $MAIL" it has the correct value. It's almost like
somehow logging in via the KDM manager (again, haven't tested with GDM
since I don't use Gnome, so I don't know if the problem is repeatable
there), it misses that part of the PAM authentication/setup or otherwise
just doesn't bother to pass that variable along. So I ultimately did
have to create a file in /etc/profile.d that sets $MAIL and exports it.
Now, even when logging in directly to the GUI, "echo $MAIL" shows what
it should. :-)
--Dave
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