[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Why are mailboxes in /var/mail owned by group mail?



On Wed, 19 Dec 2012, Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote:

The subject came up in the course of bug #693114 which in a nutshell is caused by dovecot by default copying the permissions of the users mailbox in /var/mail for indexes in the users home directory. Naturally, this fails when the user is not a member of group mail.

What is the reason for mailboxes to be owned by group mail when in Debian we have per-user groups and AFAIK no daemons or other system processes belong to the mail group?

As I understand things, it is so MUAs can lock the mailbox in mbox format.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=414264 discusses it further.

-- Asheesh.


Reply to: