4.2 lost mail

[kolling at magic.ARPA]

>Is anyone aware of a problem that causes local mail not to be delivered
>on a 4.2 system.    Once a week or so, I receive a report from someone
>who is sure that local mail was not delivered.  No error indication is
>returned to the sender and no trace of the message can be found.   I've
>confirmed a few cases, so I'm sure that all cases are not user errors.
>Any ideas?

Both mh and mhe users can lose mail if they use emacs to compose
messages and write the message to a file before sending it.  The write
breaks the connection between the buffer and the file mh/mhe expects
the message to be in, so an essentially empty buffer is mailed, and even
the empty buffer doesn't get to the intended recipient since the To field
is empty also.  However, this does "leave a trace".  In the
log files you'll find a message-id line and a From line, but no To
line.

Karen (kolling at decwrl.arpa or circus::kolling)