Subject: EMAIL! HELP!

From: Fundamental <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 23:59:29 +1000 (EST)

Hi everyone,

I am having terrible email problems.  It seems my email works only 50% of 
the time, one of three things happen each time i send/receive an email

(1) I get it

(2) It disappears into oblivion

(3)or i get this message

Date: Sat, 8 Jun 96 01:57 EST
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Subject: mail failed, returning to sender

|------------------------- Message log follows: -------------------------|
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Received: by electric.rain.aic.net.au
        id <[email-masked]>
        (Debian /\oo/\ Smail3.1.29.1 #29.33); Sat, 8 Jun 96 01:57 EST
Message-Id: <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Jun 96 01:57 EST
From: kaneda (Mikiel Mifsud)   

This message is telling me iam sending the message to myself, which iam not.

I am using smail and pine and havnt had problems (i hope) until recently.

The only thing that could be the problem (?) is that i have a softlink 
from my mailbox in /var/spool to my home directory (because my / is full)

ANY help MUCH appreciated

PS i tried purging and reinstalling pine/smail/mailx to no avail:(

--       __o        /\	                Michael Mifsud
   --   `\ <     /\/  \_    On parole from Uni Of Wollongong Penitentiary
-- ___( )/( )___/                      [email-masked]

---

From: Craig Sanders <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 10:34:02 +1000 (EST)

> from my mailbox in /var/spool to my home directory (because my / is

You probably should have partitioned the disk so that /var and/or
/var/spool were separate partitions.  Too late for that now, unless you
want to reformat.

You can still add another drive and mount a partition as /var if you
want.

Another way to do this is to move the mail spool directory to a
partition with more space available.

e.g. if /usr has lots of free space, try doing the following:

mkdir -p /usr/spool
cp -af /var/spool/mail /usr/spool
rm -rf /var/spool/mail
ln -s /var/spool/mail /usr/spool/mail

This is the reason why i tend to mount extra drives/partitions as
general purpose directories (e.g. /usr1, /usr2, /usr3 etc) rather than
as special purpose directories (e.g. /var/spool/mail, /var/spool/news).

It gives me the flexibility to move spool directories etc around on
my system from one disk to another, and just change the sym link in
/var/spool to point to the new location.

e.g. on my system, /usr2 (a 540MB quantum scsi) has a directory 
called /usr2/spool.  

/usr3 (a 650MB Micropolis scsi) also has /usr3/spool. 

news spool is in /usr2/spool/news, and mail is in /usr3/spool/mail.  I
want nn's database on a separate drive from the main news spool (to
minimise disk thrashing) so that's in /usr3/spool/nn. 

With appropriate sym links in /var/spool, I don't even have to recompile
anything - it all works transparently to the programs.

$ ls -alF /var/spool | grep -- "->"

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           16 Jun 10 17:32 mail -> /usr3/spool/mail/
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           16 Jun 10 17:32 news -> /usr2/spool/news/
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           14 Jun 10 17:32 nn -> /usr3/spool/nn/

Some people will probably think that this is an ugly way of doing things
- and i can see their point.  But for me, the flexibility is worth a
little bit of ugliness.

Craig