Comment 4 for bug 911260

Easiest way is to use a liveCD: after booting, install mail-notification and wait for a new mail (or send one to yourself) to check whether your issue is fixed. Disadvantage is that you need to install and configure your email, but you cannot break your existing setup.

Another possibility to download the Precise package manually and see whether it can be installed (ie all dependencies are available). If not, the missing dependencies will be reported and if there are no dependencies on 'core packages' (like libc6) you could try to install them as well. A more 'automated' way for doing so is adding the Precise repositories and using 'apt pinning' to selectively allow to install precise packages.