I have mail, but where?

[Steve Randall]

On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:50:54 +0100
Andrea Venturoli <ml at netfence.it> wrote:

> APseudoUtopia ha scritto:
> > Type "mail"
> 
> You have 10 mail messages in /var/mail/.
> %mail
> No mail for  andrea

Are there really two spaces in a row there? That's a vital clue. For
some reason your 'USER' environment variable is set to ' andrea' (with a
leading space). Then .cshrc sets the 'mail' shell variable to
'(/var/mail/ andrea)'. That's now a list with two elements. Since the
first is a directory, csh counts the files in it, assuming they are
messages.

Since you don't have this problem with console logins, look for a
configuration error in your GUI login manager.

HTH