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4. Rmail Files and Inboxes

Unix places your incoming mail in a file called your inbox. When you start up Rmail, it copies the new messages from your inbox into your primary mail file, an Rmail file which also contains other messages saved from previous Rmail sessions. In this file, you actually read the mail with Rmail. The operation is called getting new mail. You can repeat it at any time using the g key in Rmail. The inbox file name is `/usr/spool/mail/username' in Berkeley Unix, `/usr/mail/username' in system V.

There are two reason for having separate Rmail files and inboxes.

  1. The format in which Unix delivers the mail in the inbox is not adequate for Rmail mail storage. It has no way to record attributes (such as `deleted') or user-specified labels; it has no way to record old headers and reformatted headers; it has no way to record cached summary line information.

  2. It is very cumbersome to access an inbox file without danger of losing mail, because it is necessary to interlock with mail delivery. Moreover, different Unix systems use different interlocking techniques. The strategy of moving mail out of the inbox once and for all into a separate Rmail file avoids the need for interlocking in all the rest of Rmail, since only Rmail operates on the Rmail file.

When getting new mail, Rmail first copies the new mail from the inbox file to the Rmail file and saves the Rmail file. It then deletes the inbox file. This way a system crash may cause duplication of mail between the inbox and the Rmail file, but it cannot lose mail.

Copying mail from an inbox in the system's mailer directory actually puts it in an intermediate file, `~/.newmail'. This is because the interlocking is done by a C program that copies to another file. `~/.newmail' is deleted after mail merging is successful. If there is a crash at the wrong time, this file will continue to exist and will be used as an inbox the next time you get new mail.

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