Sendmail user mail file missing - Again

[David Niemi]

On Sun, 2005-08-07 at 10:15 -0500, Jeff Vian wrote:
> 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"

Thanks for the tips, I tried it an the user still doesn't receive the
messages from the cron jobs via aliases.  Yes, I did verify that the
name to receive the root email is correct and I did run newaliases.

I created another user and for this user the mail file was automatically
created when the user was created.

Any other ideas?