On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 20:22:12 +0000, Felix Karpfen wrote:
> Since switching to Debian Etch, I no longer get messages (from cron and
> logcheck) delivered to my user-mailbox. Exim 4 delivers them to the
> mail-queue in /var/spool/exim4/input; when the queue is emptied, they
> appear to end up in /dev/null.
I think the mails should go to /var/mail/<your_username> for the default
configuration. The Lenny/Sid version of exim4 has a debconf dialog
question that lets you choose between "mbox format in /var/mail" and
"Maildir format in home directory".
> The following uncovered advice in "man update-exim4.conf:
>
> | dc_localdelivery
> |
> | name of the default transport for local mail delivery. Defaults to
> | mail_spool if unset, use maildir_home for delivery to ~/Maildir/. This
> | setting does not correspond to a Debconf question and needs to be set
> | manually.
>
> is too cryptic for me.
The setting is in the file /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf on my Sid
box. As far as I understand the passage that you quoted above, the value
of this variable does get taken into account whenever you run
"dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config" but Etch has no explicit question about
it in the debconf dialog, therefore you have to make sure that it is set
correctly before you issue the dpkg-reconfigure command.
So the question is, what is in your /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf?
I have
dc_localdelivery='mail_spool'
which is the unchanged default setting and means that local mails to my
user end up in /var/mail/florian (a flat file in mbox format that
contains the concatenated messages). I can access these mails with every
MUA that understands the mbox format.
> I would welcome a fuller explanation of what it says, and guidance
> on the correct entry in "update-exim4.conf" to post local mail to my
> user-mailbox. In case it is relevant, my "postmaster" alias is "root"
> and my "root" alias is the normal user.
Check the settings in update-exim4.conf.conf, then run a simple test:
echo "just a test..." | mail -s "test-local" $USER@localhost
Check the file in /var/mail with any mbox capable MUA or simply by
looking at it with "less". If you cannot find the test message, check
the queue for frozen messages by running "exim4 -bp" as root.
If the test above works then you should also try
echo "just a test..." | mail -s "test-local 2" $USER
to see if there is a discrepancy between /etc/mailname and the hostnames
that exim considers to be local deliveries.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |