Re: Making root run fetchmail as a user?

[Mark Devin <mdevin@ozemail.com.au>]

Henrique M Holschuh wrote:

> Yes.  BTW, if your user 'mail' has 'mail' as it default group, AND since
> Debian uses a sgid mail spool by default, it should be able to deliver mail
> to anyone even if you are forcing fetchmail to call, say, procmail to do it.
>
> AND I should add that when talking SMTP to a MTA (i.e. you told fetchmail to
> deliver to a SMTP server), fetchmail can deliver email to anyone, regardless
> of the user it is being run as. Or at least it damn well should be able to
> do it...

OK, I tried it.  It seems to still not want to run.
Here is what I did:
1.  Copied my users .fetchids and .fetchmailrc files to /etc/ppp/ and changed the
group and owner for them to "mail"
2.  Changed my /etc/ppp/ip-up.d/fetchmail-up script to be as follows:
#!/bin/sh
su mail /usr/bin/fetchmail --fetchmailrc /etc/ppp/.fetchmailrc --idfile
/etc/ppp/.fetchids

It doesn't seem to want to run when I do this.

What is wrong with this?  Nb. I do not have a home directory for "mail" - just the
default settings for the usual debian installation.
ie my /etc/group file contains:
mail:x:8:mark

and my /etc/passwd file contains:
mail:x:8:8:mail:/var/spool/mail:/bin/sh

Regards.

Mark.