For the last year, I used a Linux box (Alpha) with many 2.1.x and 2.2.x
kernels, with mailbox on a NFSv2 server (SunOS 4.1.x) and the "new mail"
message would never fail (except with early versions of the NFSv3 patch,
which is now correct).
I use my own "new mail" detection and it reports new mail if and only
if mtime is strictly greater than atime. And this works both on NFSv2
and NFSv3. You do not want to update the atime each time you read from
a file (it would defeat the purpose of read-caching) and therefore
its value is not reliable alone. However, upon modification, atime is
correctly updated.
What is your NFS server ? The problem might be there. Here, SunOS
and Solaris servers.
--Thomas Pornin
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