Procmail can't create mailbox

[Rick Stevens]

Bob McClure Jr wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 09:28:38AM -0500, Mark Corsi wrote:
>> My guess is that the server is seeing the process as 'other'. This leaves
>> two solutions. One is to start the process with sudo so it starts as root. I
>> would hazard a guess that this would open up an unexpected security hole
>> since this is a mail process. The other solution is to make the process
>> owner part of the group that owns that folder and make the folder group
>> writable. Pretty sure the second solution will maintain security while
>> accomplishing your goal.
> 
> Well, I already have a sufficiently secure work-around, but that works
> around a symptom.  I want to find out why an out-of-the-box
> configuration quit working.

Were there any diagnostics in the logs that may be of use?  Did you
check /usr/bin/procmail and verified it was rwxr-xr-x (755), owned by
root, group of mail?  Yes, /var/mail is a symlink to /var/spool/mail and
the link should be mode rwxrwxrwx (777).

/var/spool/mail itself should be owned by root, group of mail with mode
rwxrwxr-x (775).  The files below that should be owned by the user whose
mailbox it is, group of mail with mode rw-rw---- (660).

I know of no extra things that may be affected by the addition of a user
via the "adduser" scripts that wouldn't be handled IF all of the user-
related files (home directories, hidden files, etc.) are present.

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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer                      ricks at nerd.com -
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