Dear Maintainer,

   * What led up to the situation?
   emacs VM was unable to read mail from local spool due to standard
   permissions; when that was fixed mail was corrupted by spurious lines.
   It turned out this was because of peculiar behaviour of a
   'movemail' binary which appears to be included in the emacs package.

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?

   Installed the mailutils package, which brings in a GNU version of
   movemail and makes it the default.

   * What was the outcome of this action?

   Fixed.  I think emacs24-x should be dependent on mailutils.