Why is it that if I use the "mail" command to check mail within (Red Hat 6.2) Linux for a given user, the response is "No mail for [username]" even though I know mail is being stored for the user at /var/spool/mail/username?

Where is mail looking for mail, such that it is not finding it???

I have exhaustively read the documentation on this issue for hours, and mail should be looking for messages in /var/spool/mail/username, as stated. Why can't it recognize them?

I can even read these mail messages using pine, but "mail" itself cannot find these messages. Why?

Another question:
One user in particular on my system is not recognized by mail as a user on my system. Any mail sent to this user is sent to a dead.letter file instead. Where the heck does mail look to see if an addressee is a user? (Nowhere that I I can find.) What do I need to do to make a user recognizable to mail?

This is ridiculous. I like Linux despite Linux. (i.e., I must say, ~nothing~ ever works on Linux. But I just keep trying to make it work anyway....)

Thanks,
Ben

which mail package do you have installed? If it's sendmail, which version is it?

I have sendmail installed. It is version 8.9.3-20.

As someone suggested, I did try the following:
echo $MAIL
It returned:
/var/spool/mail/[username]
as expected. So that seems to be fine.

Btw, I did learn the reason why one user, in particular, is unable to be the addressee of any mail. Red Hat Linux is fine with a username that includes an uppercase letter, but sendmail is not.

Thanks for your help,
Ben

Just one more interesting piece of information:

I scanned the archives of linux.redhat.misc for any problems similar to this, and ~indeed~, others have experienced this same problem as well (i.e., mail properly stored at /var/spool/mail/[username], yet mail indicates no messages), but unfortunately, no one appears to have ever offered a definitive explanation or solution for this problem.

I re-posted my question to that newsgroup on Monday as well, hoping that someone would know how to solve this problem.

Thanks,
Ben