Strange encounter with "vm"

Greetings, running on Gentoo I have installed (among others) the following packag- es: app-editors/xemacs version 21.4.24-r1 app-xemacs/vm version 8.11 Recently I installed the completely unrelated package "sys-apps/smart- montools" which depends on "virtual/mailx" which in turn depends on at least one of the packages "net-mail/mailutils", "mail-client/mailx", "mail-client/nail", or "sys-freebsd/freebsd-ubin". Since neither of the latter four packages was already installed, the first one was picked, "net-mail/mailutils". Later I pressed "g" in a "vm" window to get newly arrived mail and was confronted with an error message to the effect that my crash box had an invalid file type. And indeed, at the place where my crash box was ex- pected there was now a directory, and in sub-directory "new/" of this directory I found what probably was my new mail, each mail in a separate file. After plenty of head scratching I eventually found out that the freshly installed package "net-mail/mailutils" provides the binary "/usr/bin/ movemail". Apparently "vm" first does a PATH search for "movemail" be- fore it decides to use the "movemail" binary provided by XEmacs! I do not now whether or not this would also happen using the more recent version 21.5.34 of XEmacs which is also available on Gentoo but is still marked "testing". But I think that not explicitly setting variable "vm- movemail-program" should indicate to use XEmacs' version of "movemail", even if another "movemail" programme is reachable via "PATH". End of Bug Report or Enhancement Request. What follows is a short desc- ription of how to cleanly recover from the damage caused, in case any- body else is searching the web after having had the same mishap: 1. Rename the directory which is abusing the name of your crash box: mv PathToCrashBox PathToCrashBox.off 2. Uninstall the package which pulled in package "net-mail/mailutils" (in my case "sys-apps/smartmontools") and all its dependencies. 3. Prevent package "net-mail/mailutils" from ever being installed again. Under Gentoo this is done by issuing: echo net-mail/mailutils | sudo tee -a /etc/portage/package.mask 4. Again install the package you just uninstalled, and this time another of the alternatives required by dependency "virtual/mailx" will be pulled in. 5. Now recover the mails burried in directory "PathToCrashBox.off" (I'm not sure how thoroughly, if at all "vm" will check the syntax of the faked "From " headers required to indicate the beginning of each new mail, but using exactly two blanks on either side of "Wed Jul" worked for me. And yes, using the same "From " header over and over again did not at all bother "vm"): cd PathToCrashBox.off/new for f in * do echo 'From a(a)gmail.com Wed Jul 3 17:14:54 2013' cat $f echo done >> ~/recovery 6. In "vm" enter "v" and then "~/recovery" to open this temporary folder and start reading your almost lost mail. Sincerely, Rainer