Re: Strange delivery in postfix/procmail configuration

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2000 at 07:21:21PM +0100, Thomas Parmelan wrote:
> 01 février 2000, Michael Meskes <meskes@debian.org> :
> 
> > Also if I send a local mail to michael@fam-meskes.de it is delivered
> > immediately. If I send it to root@fam-meskes.de, though, it gets delivered
> > immediately too but it ends up in /var/spool/nobody. Root has neither a
> > .forward nor a .procmailrc file. And no, it's not listed in /etc/aliases
> > either. 
> 
> This is a FAQ: when using Postfix, you *MUST* alias root to a real user.
> See <URL:http://www.postfix.org/faq.html#root>.

sort of.

postfix's own delivery agent can deliver to root's mailbox, but postfix
will NEVER fork an external program (e.g. procmail) as root. it either
changes UID to the owner of the mail being delivered or if that user is
root, then it changes UID to nobody.

so procmail gets run as nobody when delivering root's mail.

i work around this by just symlinking /var/spool/mail/root to
/var/spool/mail/nobody - then i can read root's mail as root. note that
this is NOT the recommended way of doing it - most people will recommend
that you direct root's mail to another user in /etc/aliases.

craig

--
craig sanders