Subject: Re: vm nfs access to /var/spool/mail file

From: Andrew Innes <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 12:11:13 GMT

On Tue, 17 Dec 1996 16:41:36 -0800 (PST), Chris McMahan <[email-masked]> said:
>Running Windows NT 4.0 and emacs 19.33
>
>I am currently using the VM mail program with NTEmacs 19.33, using the
>pop mail capability of vm.
>
>I've got NFS mounting, with my /var/spool/mail/ directory mounted as
>drive "f:", but I can't seem to find a suitable way of setting the spool
>directory's location correctly for VM.
>
>I've tried setting the vm-spool-files variable in my .vm file to any
>number of combinations of "f:/cmcmahan" "F:/cmcmahan" "f\:/cmcmahan"
>etc..., but none are recognized.
>
>I've tried setting my environment variable MAILPATH to f:\, then
>commenting out the vm-spool-files setting, but again no luck.
>
>I'm already saving my mail in folders using NFS mounts. Is it possible
>to use an NFS-mounted /var/spool/mail file with VM, or am I stuck
>typing my password every time for the POP connection (don't want my
>password in the .vm file for obvious reasons).

I'm not familiar with VM, but I would guess that VM uses "movemail" to
fetch mail from spool files, as RMAIL and Gnus do.  That being the case,
the problem is that movemail's direct spool file access is disabled by
default on NT, because the call to lock the spool file while reading it
does not work on Samba drives (at least not the ones we have here, which
appears to be version 1.9.13).

Without proper locking you *will* eventually lose mail, so I decided to
err on the side of caution and disable direct access altogether.
However, all the code is there - if you can recompile movemail you just
need to comment out the #define DISABLE_DIRECT_ACCESS near the top of
lib-src/movemail.c.  You are responsible for ensuring that your NFS
software does do proper file locking though.

Personally, I would find a way to hack VM to remember your POP password,
at least during your Emacs session, so you only have to type it once.
RMAIL and Gnus both do that.

AndrewI