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After an su root, I run "/bin/mail -u root" to check for any mail that has arrived for root. It doesn't find any, and reports "No mail for root". However, I can see that there is mail in root's mailbox file, /var/spool/mail/root. Furthermore, running "/bin/mail -f /var/spool/mail/root" allows me to access it. The problem here is that "mail -u user" is (according to the man page) supposed to be eqivalent to "mail -f /var/spool/mail/user". It obviously is not working correctly.
Your USER environment variable is not changed when you do "su root". Do "su - root" instead.