Problem with Fedora1 and ipop3d

[Jeff Vian]

Rick Stevens wrote:

> Tim Alberts wrote:
>
>> I've learned that if I set the /var/spool/mail folder permission to 
>> 777, I no longer get the following error.
>>
>> Mailbox Vulnerable - Directory /var/spool/mail must have 1777 protection
>>
>> It seems odd that something requires worldwriteable access to the 
>> /var/spool/mail folder.
>>
>>
>> However, the main problem persists that if I use kmail to retrieve 
>> email from the pop3 server, the /var/spool/mail/user email file gets 
>> written with the message:
>>
>>> From MAILER-DAEMON Thu Apr 22 11:50:17 2004
>>
>> Date: 22 Apr 2004 11:50:17 -0700
>> From: Mail System Internal Data <MAILER-DAEMON at localhost.localdomain>
>> Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA
>> Message-ID: <1082659817 at localhost.localdomain>
>> X-IMAP: 1082659816 0000000002
>> Status: RO
>>
>> This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not
>> a real message.  It is created automatically by the mail system 
>> software.
>> If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be 
>> re-created
>> with the data reset to initial values.
>>
>> A few people have hinted that imapd writes this to a mail file to 
>> keep track of which emails have been read.  How can this be happening 
>> if I have the imapd disabled?
>
>
> As I said in an earlier posting, ipop3d is based on Crispin's c-client
> code.  So is imapd, so even though you have imapd disabled, the ipop3d
> may be inserting that message because it's done in the c-client bit.
>
> I just looked at the source code for imapd and ipop3d (for the
> terminally curious, specifically the imap-2000e version) and they both
> use the c-client "unix" driver for mailboxes.  That driver inserts the
> message, so now even the POP daemon inserts the IMAP housekeeping
> message.  Lovely.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> - Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
> - VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
> -                                                                    -
> -                He who laughs last thinks slowest.                  -
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
Now I am really puzzled!

Everyone on this thread seems upset by a behavior that I know has 
existed in mail on Linux for at least the last 7 years.

Is it because you just found out about it?  or is there really a problem 
with this behavior?  Email clients do not even see that dummy message. 
 Only when looking at the box contents with a text browser such as 
cat/less/etc or an editor such as vi/vim/emacs/etc do you even see it.

As I said earlier, it seems to be put there by the daemon serving the 
mail, and I have seen it ranging from pine to mutt to other clients such 
as fetchmail and mozilla.  I believe it is being put there by the host, 
and not sendmail or the client.  I think this is more of a scare than a 
problem as it is a housekeeping thing.  Alexander has recently shown that.