Permission denied linux mail command

Question

I ran a simple command "mail" on my Suse Linux 11.1 box and it's display "/var/mail/john: Permission denied"

I had two users, john and peter

When I login as peter and ran "mail" it display the same error when I login as john

"/var/mail/john: Permission denied"

I'm using postfix as my MTA.

Your help will be much appriciated.

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Thanks guys,

Here's the output from the command ls -l /var/mail

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2011-08-06 11:54 /var/mail -> spool/mail

Here's the out output when I run echo $MAIL

/var/mail/john

I login with different user and run echo $MAIL it output the same line /var/mail/john

Answer 1

The user is probably not in the mail group.

You can run groups to check in which groups you are. As said we also need the output of ls -l /var/mail