>(Just to make sure we are talking about the same thing: The file
>/var/spool/mail/<yourname> was deleted, it's not just that read
>messages were moved to $HOME/mbox? Or have you mounted your mail
>spool over NFS, with attribute caching switched on, and just lost a
>couple of messages? What file system is your /var/spool/mail on?)
Neither problem - for 1) mutt always asks if I want to move files from
/var/... to inbox and the default is no - I always just press enter, and
for 2) I am connected to a LAN at work, but it is a laptop, so I explicitly
set up everything locally (just mount public shares for work files, not
home or mail).
I do use fetchmail to bring my mail off the mail server to my laptop. I
checked the fetchmail -F comment that Thomas mentioned (backed up
/var/spool/mail/zen, ran fetchmail -F straight from the command line, as
usual, and re-checked - file still there, no bytes missing :\
That's not to say there's not some other fetchmail bug, but I wouldn't have
expected it.
The only other thing I can think of is procmail - don't know how it does
what it does, but I have set up .procmailrc and every now and then add an
entry to it - thing is, it gets to messages before they are dumped in
system inbox (or so I thought).
>A report when you lost your inbox the first time would have been
>nice.
The first time was actually the first time I started using mutt - from my
other (large) box -> win NT. I was getting really pissed with MS Outlook
Express, and everyone was raving about mutt, so I used NT's sucky (that's a
very generous adjective!) telnet client and mutt. At the time I put it down
to the NT telnet client and gave up with Unix mail readers. Now I have a
laptop which I put Debian GNU/Linux on and spend a lot of my time on. Only
thing I remember is that /var/spool/mail/zen was set to 0 bytes -
effectively deleted. In this case there was no fetchmail involved, and I
don't remember ever setting up .procmailrc (this was my company Unix
account, not the laptop), as I was just starting to try to get away from
NT.
>Best with instructions about your system and on how to
>reproduce this, so we can try to fix the problem.
I wish I could pin point it a little better - the problem is that I never
notice until the next time I start mutt and my inbox is empty.
I tried the following as alternatives:
- RMail (emacs) - seems to have a single mail file
- Gnus (got bogged down in the doco and gave up
- pine worked for recovery, but non-free so I am looking for something free
- nmh (mh replacement) sounded excellent, but didn't work well with my
current folder files
- mail, mailx, etc. too basic
- gush - I have emailed the authors waiting for licensing info (non-free)
- postilion seemed really slow - also X (no console version, which I want)
- a couple of gnome MUAs are on the way, but still getting there and
require other libs (eg. gtk+, gtk--, and or others), and are also
non-console
- z-mail is touted as "the best unix console-based email client" or
something like that, but I think is really non-free
- elm seemed to do everything that nmh promised. And lots of doco to boot.
This is the closest thing that seemed workable. It actually seemed like an
old version, or at least a strong inspiration for mutt - I kept finding
myself feeling quite familiar with it, and wishing it was just "a bit more
like mutt". Little annoying things like: no tab-completion of folder/
directory changes, doesn't remember the last directory name (have to retype
everything each time you search), etc.
- VM (emacs) I have been told this isn't too bad - this is the only one I
haven't got to yet.
