Re: Quick mail delivery question
On Thu, Jul 19, 2001 at 10:22:57AM -0400, Adam Bell wrote:
> Well, I have hacked the problem, but I would like to know understand a
> little better, so here goes:
>
> I am using exim for LDA (apparently) because I looked in exim.conf and
> just changed the delivery location to ~/.inbox and the permission to 600
> and it works fine. Sort of.
>
> Problem being, that now when an individual user makes a .procmailrc
> file, it does nothing unless they forward pipe it to procmail, which is
> in a word gimpy. Also, I may be a lamer for this, but I'm not used to
> using exim and I can't seem to get the group set to the user's group for
> the .inbox file...the best I can do is group mail, which I don't like
> (even though no one is even going to belong to that group).
>
> So the question has mutated into A) How do I use procmail as my LDA, and
> B) how do I configure /etc/procmailrc to set group and owner correctly,
> provided that I can manage to deliver to the right user's mailbox.
I use exim (or smail on an older Debian install that started out that way)
and then use procmail to direct the mail to mailboxes (files for mutt)
under ~/Mail, with the .procmailrc rules splitting out the various mail
lists, suspected SPAM, etc. The mailbox files end up being written
with my userid and default group (same as the userid, Debian style),
and with perms of 600. Yes, procmail is triggered by a .forward of:
"|exec /usr/bin/procmail"; I have no problem with that.
As for adjusting the group of the non-procmail delivered mail with
exim, I'm not an expert on that. When I deliver mail to users like
that the mail ends up in a /var/spool/mail file with group "mail", but
(as you say) that is an administrative group for mail, not a "real"
group in the functional sense. I don't see a problem with that either.
But I'm running mostly workstations, so my requirements would not be
the same as yours.
To address (but not answer) your questions:
A) IANAE (I am not a expert ;), but it's my understanding that smail or
exim can be the delivery agent, and that exim has filtering capabilities,
but that procmail is _just_ for filtering, not a generic delivery agent.
B) I do not have an /etc/procmailrc file. My ~/.procmailrc file is:
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail
DEFAULT=bulk
LOGFILE=log
VERBOSE=no
rules ...
:0 :
* ^TO_debian-.+@lists\.debian\.org
* ^TO_debian-\/[^@ ]+
debian-`echo $MATCH | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`
more rules ...
No explicit attempt is made to affect the groups or permissions of the
files to which the mail is spooled.
- MikeT
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