Re: Mail source problem (?)

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org> writes:

> Recently (after an update to emacs about a month ago, debian unstable) I
> started getting a message when checking mail about a mail source error:
>
> Mail source (file :path /var/mail/nowan) error (Searching for program). 
> Continue? (yes or no)
>
> This is apparently from my secondary select method meant to pull in
> localhost mail, and it doesn't seem to be anything obvious like a
> permissions problem.  It doesn't make any difference whether I respond
> yes or no, either way mail out of /var/mail is ignored and the rest of
> my mail is fetched successfully.
>
> It's clearly some sort of compatibility issue and I figured I needed to
> sort through my gnus file and figure out where it was coming from --
> annoying but no big deal.  And since it's only a small minority of my
> mail affected it hasn't bugged me enough to pursue it till now.
>
> But the annoying thing, apart from the fact that the error is a bit
> obscure (what program?), is that if I turn debug-on-quit on so as to
> figure out where the bug is being triggered and why, the message goes
> away removing my chance to trigger the debugger.
>
> Any ideas either a) what the problem fetching local mail is, or b) why
> debug-on-quit makes the message go away?

Are you sure it isn't `debug-on-error' you want? Unless you're getting a
hang when checking mail, and then trying to C-g out of the hang, you
won't trigger `debug-on-quit'. Maybe try the former?

Eric