On Sun, 2005-08-07 at 10:48 -0400, David Niemi wrote:
> On my system which had the problems with the smp kernels after the
> installation, when I was finally able to go through the first time boot
> screens I created the user "daven", no upper case this time. At first I
> had tried to keep the /home partition, but end up formating it anyway.
>
> Everything else was created fine except for the file in /var/spool/mail.
> I'd like to use this account to receive the messages for root from the
> different cron jobs through aliases and running "newaliases".
>
> I haven't made any changes to the files in /etc/mail or others.
>
> Other than backing up, removing the user, and copying the files back is
> there a way to get the sendmail file?
>
I don't have any problems with local mail coming to my user.
There are 3 steps involved.
1. The aliases file must be edited to tell mail to transfer mail for
root to your user. It must have a line such as:
root: user
2. Then the command "newaliases" must be run to put that in the
database actually used.
3. The old mail file for root should be transferred to your user. (This
is not necessary but is nice so all of root's mail has been gotten.)
What I do is make sure my users mail file is empty (has size = 0 ),
then in the /var/spool/mail directory I first look at the ownership of
the users mail file (it should be owner "user" group "mail"). I then do
a "mv root user" followed by a "chown user:mail user"
This all then just works to forward any mail that normally gets sent to
root to the users mailbox.
Note that local mail is on by default and unless you have done something
to turn it off this process should work.
In reference to the missing file above, also note that the mailbox will
get created the first time that user receives email, so the fact there
is no mailbox file in /var/spool/mail should not be an issue. It only
is of concern when you are certain something should be there and it is
not.
