Problem with Fedora1 and ipop3d

[Tim Alberts]

On Thursday 22 April 2004 18:46, Jeff Vian wrote:
> 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.

You are correct.  I am having trouble with email dissappearing on my FC1 
server.  I've been running RH7.3 without any problems for a couple years and 
have never seen these messages in the user mailboxes before.  I thought these 
were a symptom of the problem I was experiencing.  However, as you and others 
have so kindly helped me understand, these are not error messages they are 
required by the server.

I am currently looking at the source of my problems being either in my 
procmail recipe, or the ClamAV program I installed.

So thank you for the help you have given me.  Any more help you can offer 
would be appreciatted, but I think I have to better define where I'm at 
before I can ask for help.

>
> 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.