bug#12646: 24.2.50; Eshell problem with mailx(1)

[Stephen Berman]

Since updating my openSUSE system from 12.1 to 12.2, I cannot read email
by invoking mailx from the eshell prompt:

Welcome to the Emacs shell

/data/steve/lib/emacs/gtk $ mail
Heirloom mailx version 12.5 7/5/10.  Type ? for help.
"/var/spool/mail/steve": 1 message 1 unread
>U  1 jan.h.d@swipnet.se Sat Oct 13 23:53  109/4392  Re: bug#12612: 24.2.50; F
? 
WARNING: terminal is not fully functional
-  (press RETURN)
?  
At EOF
? 

This happens both with my Emacs build from the current trunk and with
openSUSE's official build of 23.3.

With openSUSE 12.1, which contains the same version of mailx as 12.2, I
also get the warning but after typing RETURN, the top of the mail is
displayed and I can scroll through it by repeatedly typing RET.  This is
openSUSE's official build of 23.3 and with a build of 24.1 (I can't test
the current trunk on openSUSE 12.1 without rebuilding Emacs, which is
currently rather inconvenient).  Both versions of openSUSE use the same
version of mailx, and in both the value of $TERM in eshell is dumb.  If
this is not an Emacs or Eshell problem, what could account for it?


In GNU Emacs 24.2.50.3 (x86_64-suse-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.4.4)
 of 2012-10-14 on rosalinde
Bzr revision: 110543 handa@gnu.org-20121014080652-4o4ptkifsi2xqtk4
Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11203000
System Description:     openSUSE 12.2 (x86_64)

Configured using:
 `configure '--without-toolkit-scroll-bars' 'CFLAGS=-g -O0''

Important settings:
  value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8
  value of $XMODIFIERS: @im=local
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix
  default enable-multibyte-characters: t