Almost entirely unrelated, but do you know anything about pop daemons? Sarah's trying to use pop to access her mailbox on ming, and ming's popd just keeps deciding she has no mail (even when there's clearly mail in /var/spool/mail/sarah)...

Sorry, no idea. All my POP hackery has been from the client side (unless you count the half of my pop-agent that listens on the Unix socket).

If it were me I'd try stracing the popd to see which mailbox it's really checking, but you've probably tried that already...