Re: Mutt can not delete mails

[Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org>]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 04:16:58PM +0200, Hans wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 28. Oktober 2021, 15:38:34 CEST schrieb Greg Wooledge:
> Hi Greg,
> 
> of course I can. This is step-by-step what I do:
> 
> Starting mutt from the commandline as normal user.  Mutt in ncurses appears. 
> Now I want to mark and delete all mails. I press Shift+D, then it asks the for 
> the sample and I press . (dot) and * (asterix). 
> 
> By pressing the "Enter" key all mails are marked ND+.
> 
> Now pressing "q" (for quit) and it asks me "20 as deletion marked mails 
> delete? ([yes]/no):" (Note, I have a German environment, so it asks me in 
> German. This sentence a translated by me).
>  
> I answer yes, and it appears "temporary file could not be created".
> 
> Pressing again "q" and now answer "no", mutt closes.
> 
> Does this help?

OK... that's not what I asked for, but let's see if I can reproduce
it.

I created an account named "tester", and installed procmail, and gave
tester a ~/.qmail file containing "|preline procmail" to force delivery
to /var/mail.  Then I sent a message to it:

unicorn:~$ echo test | mailx -s testing tester

and verified delivery:

tester@unicorn:~$ ls -la /var/mail
total 12
drwxrwsr-x  2 root   mail 4096 Oct 28 10:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 13 root   root 4096 Mar  3  2018 ..
-rw-rw----  1 tester mail  455 Oct 28 10:25 tester

Then fired up mutt as tester:

tester@unicorn:~$ export MAIL=/var/mail/tester
tester@unicorn:~$ mutt

I pressed D . * Enter q y

Mutt exited cleanly, and wrote:

0 kept, 1 deleted.

And now the mailbox is empty:

tester@unicorn:~$ ls -la /var/mail
total 8
drwxrwsr-x  2 root   mail 4096 Oct 28 10:28 .
drwxr-xr-x 13 root   root 4096 Mar  3  2018 ..
-rw-rw----  1 tester mail    0 Oct 28 10:25 tester

This is all acting as I expect.

Is there, perhaps, something in your .muttrc which is changing mutt's
behavior?  You could try repeating your test with the .muttrc file
temporarily renamed, and see if you get the same result.

I'm wondering, in particular, if there is some setting in mutt that
tells it to attempt to delete the inbox file if it reaches 0 messages,
and that perhaps you've enabled it.  If so, you'll want to disable it.

P.S. my system details:

Debian 11 amd64
Linux unicorn 5.10.0-9-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.70-1 (2021-09-30) x86_64 GNU/Linux
package mutt version 2.0.5-4.1
Locally installed (non-Debian) qmail (shouldn't matter here)