Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 4784
login sometimes reports that you have mail when you really don't.
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:51 EDT
I think this is a feature and not a bug as far as imap folks are concerned, but bugzilla made me choose a component, and one for login didn't exist. A feature was added to the new pine, imapd, ipop2d, and ipop3d daemons (which were included with RedHat 6.0) that keeps track of some information that they need in a bogus email message in the users inbox. These three programs know about this message and how to identify its existance so they don't ever show it to the user. Login as it currently exists, does not know about this behavior. When a user loggs in, it check to see if the size of their mailbox is > 0. If it is, it declares to them, "You have mail."....well, this is not necessesarily true, as it might just be this bogus message from pine, imapd, ipop3d, or ipop2d sitting in that inbox. I would suggest that either login should be made smart enough to recognize these messages and not count that as the user having mail, or the feature should be disabled completly in login, and it shouldn't try to report whether or not a user has mail when they log in.
changed in util-linux-2.9w-23 and later (will available in 6.1).
This does not appear to be fixed in 6.1: jik:~!52> rpm -q -f /bin/login util-linux-2.10c-3 jik:~!53> telnet localhost Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost.localdomain. Escape character is '^]'. Red Hat Linux release 6.1 (Cartman) Kernel 2.2.14 on an i686 login: jik Password: Last login: Mon Jan 24 23:23:50 on tty1 You have mail. jik:~!1> frm Mail System Internal Data DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA jik:~!2> Note the "You have mail." line, even though the only message in my mailbox is the IMAP book-keeping message.