Procmail battles

[Paul Howarth]

Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
> I have been following this thread in utter fascination and despair.
> It started out because procmail doesn't work (does not process
> ~/.procmailrc) for me with FC5 out of the chute.

It does for me. Perhaps we should concentrate on resolving why that is 
happening rather that just ranting about SELinux.

For starters, it's easy to establish if this is actually an SELinux 
problem at all. Without changing any configuration files, run this:

# setenforce 0

This turns off SELinux policy enforcement. Now try your mail delivery 
again. If it works, you have an SELinux problem. If not, your problem 
lies elsewhere.

What are the permissions and ownership of your .procmailrc file and each 
one of its parent directories?

 > Keep in mind that
> I'm trying to learn procmail.  A message that I should learn selinux
> in order to enable FC5 to be able to learn procmail is not exactly the
> kind of message I was looking for.

I agree with that. The procmail policy is broken but it's getting fixed 
- I use procmail extensively myself and have been reporting issues as 
they crop up on fedora-selinux-list, and fixes have been going into 
policy updates.

> I'd be real happy to hear someone
> say, "keep selinux off entirely until FC6 comes out and then procmail
> and selinux will play nice again", which is my basically my plan for
> focusing on procmail.

It's not the best plan though. If we can concentrate on finding the 
actual problem it'll get fixed much sooner, which will not only mean you 
get the benefits of SELinux long before FC6, it'll also mean that other 
people get the benefits of the fixes too (assuming that your setup is 
not the cause of the problem).

> Is there a reason I should NOT file a bug
> report for this procmail/selinux issue?

By all means do, but you might find that the list resolves the issue 
more quickly if you give it a chance.

Paul.