Bug#383469: exim4: exim fails to deliver mails to users whose $HOME's it cannot access

[Marc Haber]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 04:42:39PM +0300, Juha Jäykkä wrote:
> Just came across this: I have set up exim to deliver the mails to a maildir in
> /var/mail/${local_part}/Mail. Everything works fine, *except* for users whose
> $HOME (as returned by getpwnam()) is inaccessible to exim. It is easy to reproduce:
> just create a user, whose $HOME is not accessible to exim and try to send her an
> email. [I think one needs to make sure that if the home dir is /foo/bar, then /foo
> needs to be inaccessible to exim, but take your pick.] I think this behaviour is
> incorrect: why chdir() to someplace you immediately chdir() out of without doing
> anything there? I could understand, in some situations, the need to check that
> some directory is accessible, but no in this case. Moreover, this is not documented
> anywhere (at least I could not find it, had to dig the source).
> 
> There is a workaround (add home_directory = / to maildir: -section of exim's
> configuration file), but since accessing the home directory in the first place
> is not necessary, I consider this a bug to be fixed.

I can reproduce this. Since we are quite close to upstream's default
config, I'm going to check with upstream whether this is intended
behavior and why.

Greetings
Marc

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