$MAIL surprise

[Steve VanDevender]

I got email yesterday from a user who had run 'from' and got the message
"No mail in /home/stevev/$USER" (where $USER was that person's
username).  At first I thought he had pilfered my .bashrc, but on
further investigation I discovered that my home directory path had been
compiled in to sshd, because the configuration tests assume that the
directory part of $MAIL is the systemwide mail spool.  Unfortunately on
this system we deliver mail into user home directories, so we set MAIL
to $HOME/.mail rather than /var/{,spool/}mail/$USER, and this user's
shell initialization did not change MAIL from the default set by sshd.

Given that I'm doing something nonstandard, an answer of "don't
configure OpenSSH with your funky setting of MAIL" is reasonable
enough.  I can't really think of any clean solution to put into the
Portable OpenSSH code base to address this; I may end up tweaking our
local source tree so we get the right thing for our users, but this is
an interesting configuration problem that people might want to know
about.