/var/mail/<user id >related mail box

[sarma]

HI
When the user was created the mail box under /var/mail was not created ? HOw does this get created ? If this does not exist, what happens to the mail being sent to that user

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

It gets created when there is mail for the user.

Send an email to the user using elm or something and it will be created.

Alternatively the user may cause its creation by openning a mail client such as elm or mail.

SEP

[sarma]

can your clarify me couple of the related issues.

1. When we add user it does not get created automatically, Is that right ?

The situation I saw was as follows :
ther was no /var/mail/user1
when I tried to send the mail to that user, and did mailx, the system responded that there was no mail.

I used elm and it prompted me if it can create an Mail account and I responded yes.
At that time, I donot remember it created that mail box under /var/mail
But when the sendmail daemon was bounced, I saw that the mail box got created under the /var/mail/user1

The reason it might have created me somr problems was because the Oracle Apps was using Javamail via the user1 account to send mails to the other users.

Any thoughts / comments ?
thanks

[Ivan Ferreira]

The mailbox file will be created when you send the first message to the user. Send a welcome message to the user.

You should check /var/log/maillog when you send a message to the user. You should get Stat=sent.


Also, /var/mail is a hard link to /var/spool/mail, something that i did not know until today.

[sarma]

I did not see any /var/log dir on my system

[Steven E. Protter]

No /var/log ???

Thats not good:

df /var

See if its even mounted.

SEP

[sarma]

Yes, it is mounted. fyi I am on HP-UX B.11.11 U 9000/800. I am not sure if it makes any difference

df /var
/var (/dev/vg00/lvol8 ): 16533888 blocks 260367 i-nodes

[Ivan Ferreira]

Most Linux distributions (if not all) have /var/log, as said above, verify that is mounted.

Other Unix implementations have /var/adm. Verify the configuration of /etc/syslog.conf to know where the log files are located.

[Ivan Ferreira]

I don't remember whel, but it seems that in HP-UX all log files are located in a file called syslog.log.

It should be

/var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

Of

/var/adm/syslog.log

I can't remember.

[sarma]

the equivalent is
/var/adm/messages