Exim permissions

[Pigeon <jah.pigeon@ukonline.co.uk>]

Hi,

Could someone explain to me the weirdness of exim permissions?

To force delivery of email to remote addresses, it seems that I have
to pon and then exim -qf. For exim -qf, I have to be root. I'd rather
not have to.

BUT... /usr/sbin/exim is setuid root. Huh?

So I wrote a little send.my.mail.c:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(void) { return (system("/usr/sbin/exim -qf")); }

and made the executable setuid root. Still doesn't work.

I have defined myself as an exim "trusted user" in /etc/exim.conf,
but seemingly to no avail. I even commented out never_users=root and
added root to the trusted users... still no go. (So I undid that bit
about root.)

The other exim permission weirdness I'm having problems with is as
follows:

I've been writing a C program to burst incoming digests into separate
messages. This is run from a pipe in a "# Exim filter", and is
supposed to send each message on to pigeon by running exim -f to set
the From field to the original sender. I can run exim -f from the
command line no problems, as pigeon, but when the C program tries to
call it having been called from the Exim filter, it doesn't work.
Again, making the C program setuid root (or setuid pigeon) makes no
difference.

Please could someone explain what the ASA is going on?

Thanks,
Pigeon