Unable to Open Temporary file /tmp/nsmail.html

[thought-o-graphs]

I've just recently had this problem.

And it occured out of the blue.



I was unable to send any mail messages from Mozilla 1.7.2, or Netscape 7.2, or Thunderbird 0.8
and there was nothing wrong with the outgoing (smtp) server settings.

I've been reading on a bunch of different Mozilla forums that I'm not alone. but nobody seems to have foun any way to get around it.



What happens is when you press "send" you get one of the following error messages.

"Sending of Message Failed, Unable to open Temprary File /tmp/nsmail.html, Check your "Temporary Directory" Setting."


"Sending of Message Failed, Unable to open Temprary File /tmp/nsmail.tmp, Check your "Temporary Directory" Setting."


"Sending of Message Failed, Unable to open Temprary File /tmp/nsmail.eml, Check your "Temporary Directory" Setting."


But.


I solved the problem myself! Here's how to do it. on Mac OS X.

Repair and Optimize the system using a freeware application called OnyX.
available on the apple site here:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/s ... /onyx.html

Launch the application, and go to the "automate" tab.
I just "checked" all the bozes nd pressed "execute".
But I suspect that it was either the "clearing the system cache",
or deleting the system's "virtual memory" (swapfile)..

In any case, it's an excellent application.
And it never hurts to have a smoother running OS,
so I recommend that all Mac OS X users install it, regardless of
whether Mozilla or Netscape is giving you problems or not!



Ben.
www.thought-o-graphs.com

[Reed tech]

This failed for me. I finally fixed the error by making /tmp world-writable, i.e. in the terminal:
sudo chmod go+w /tmp
Then t-bird was able to send and save again.

[rsx11m]

The default permissions for /tmp on Linux are 1777, thus "drwxrwxrwt" so that everybody can write to it but only remove actually owned files. I would assume that this should be set up in a similar way for Mac OSX, which has a bit of Unix underneath.

[therube]

Back in the year 2004, permissions for /tmp were 666, so anything was possible .

[rsx11m]

Actually, I doubt that, since the lack of "execute" permission would allow you to, e.g., list the content of a directory, but not to access any files within it... has been like that since the early days of UNIX - or MacOS screwed it up completely.

[therube]

(I was actually kidding. More pointing out that the thread was over FOUR YEARS OLD.)

[rsx11m]

(oops, didn't notice that - after all, we had a September in 2008 as well... )