Bug#331716: exim4: handling of various system users

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 02:29:01PM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
> Thanks to recent local chaos, the system attempted to deliver some
> undeliverable messages to the original sender, logcheck.
> 
> /etc/aliases on my system needed
> logcheck: root
> 
> as an entry.  When I checked, I discovered a signficant, though old,
> bunch of mail delivered to /var/spool/mail/logcheck.
> 
> There's similar story for cyrus.
> 
> I don't know if either matter is properly an exim issue, but this
> seemed the best place to report it.

The issue here is that /etc/aliases does not belong to any package,
and we only create it on package installation if it doesn't exist.
This is consistent with the other MTA packages in Debian, and since
we share /etc/aliases with them, we decided to go that way.

> This suggests a more general idea: maybe there should be a router that
> sends all messages for users < 1000 to root?  I recall there's some
> Debian policy that would allow identification of account type from
> uid.

Technically, this is possible, and I am even using this approach on
some of my boxes:
set_address_data_uid:
  debug_print = "R: set_address_data for $local_part@$domain"
  check_local_user
  domains = +local_domains
  local_part_suffix = +*
  local_part_suffix_optional = yes
  address_data = "${extract{2} \
                           {:} \
                           {${lookup passwd{$local_part}}} \
                           {$value} \
                           {} \
                    }"
  driver = redirect
  data =

local_user_low_uid:
  debug_print = "R: local_user_low_uid for $local_part$local_part_suffix@$domain (uid $address_data)"
  driver = redirect
  check_local_user
  domains = +local_domains
  condition = "${if <{$address_data}{1000}{1}}"
  local_part_suffix = +*
  local_part_suffix_optional = yes
  data = zgadmin+$primary_hostname-$local_part$local_part_suffix at zugschlus.de

This will probably break with NIS or LDAP, though.

We decided against doing this to keep compatibility with other MTAs,
and we'd cement Debian policy into exim configuration which a local
admin would probably not like.

> Though I've filed a lot of trivial bugs today, and this one is only
> wishlist, I'd say it's a bit important.

Yes, it's so important that I feel that this needs to be solved in a
consistent way for all MTA packages in Debian. Would you want to
discuss this on debian-devel at l.d.o?

That being said, I am inclined to tag this bug wontfix for the time
being.

Greetings
Marc

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