[Pkg-exim4-users] local mail addressed to root

[Larry Fletcher]

On Nov 04, 2006, Marc Haber wrote:
> > On Nov 04, 2006, Magnus Holmgren wrote:
> > > On Friday 03 November 2006 22:04, Larry Fletcher took the opportunity to say:
> > > > This worked fine until I had to upgrade to Exim4.  To be able
> > > > to receive local mail I had to create another user and direct the
> > > > root mail to it, then create /etc/procmailrc using a symlink from
> > > > ~/.procmailrc.  This worked fine until I decided to remove the
> > > > Smartlist package.  Now local mail is is still delivered, but
> > > > /etc/procmailrc is not checked.  Smartlist never used the exim
> > > > config, so I don't why removing it causes a problem.
> > > 
> > > Exim 4 never delivers mail as root. That's a compilation setting, so
> > > you can't  change it without recompiling. But you can give the other
> > > user write  permission to root's mailbox and have Exim or procmail
> > > deliver it there. But I wouldn't recommend it.
> > 
> Both exim 3 and exim4 just call /usr/bin/procmail while running as the
> target user, and according to the procmail manpage (I have never used
> procmail), procmail always reads /etc/procmail as kind of system-wide
> default before accessing ~/.procmailrc. So, I guess that you have a
> procmail issue here if it does not read /etc/procmail before
> ~/.procmail. No idea why this issue has surfaced during your exim
> migration. Maybe somebody else who is more familiar with procmail can
> comment here.

When smartlist was removed, fetchmail/procmail continued to
filter the mail correctly, but exim/procmail stopped filtering
the local mail.  So I thought the problem was with exim.

To get it working again, all I had to do was change the group
permissions on '/etc/procmailrc' and '/var/mail'.

Of course, this only applies to my way of doing things.

Thanks!

   Larry