What is movemail?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 19:36:18 -0700, Neil Hodge wrote:

> All:
> 
> When trying to retrieve my local mail using thunderbird (0.7.1), I get 
> the following error:
> 
> Unable to create lock file /var/spool/mail/user.lock. . . .
> 
> I have tried just about every way I know (google, man page, "find .") to 
> find out what movemail is, but to no avail.  Anyone out there know?  Thanks.

It was Netscape Navigator's internal mailbox retrieval utility, which was
included in Mozilla Mail, too. You may need to "chmod 1777
/var/spool/mail" which is a slight security risk, since it allows your
user account to create files in /var/spool/mail, such as the mailbox lock
file.

[There's also GNU MailUtils' external movemail utility.]