bne(_at_)baynestudio(_dot_)com asked,
Well, we have already seen what bne wrote and Alan's and Stephane's citations
therefrom, so I'll cut to the chase:
| I know I am close to a solution because the file I am requesting
| does return but from postmaster and before that I get an error
| message also.
|
| So, on the client machine I get:
|
| ----- The following addresses had delivery problems -----
| "|/usr/local/bin/procmail /zen1/info/procmail" (unrecoverable error)
| (expanded from: <testing-mailbot(_at_)baynestudio(_dot_)com>)
|
| ----- Transcript of session follows -----
| procmail: Couldn't create "/var/mail/998"
| 550 "|/usr/local/bin/procmail /zen1/info/procmail" ... Can't create output:
| Error 0
|
| and I also get the message that has the file I want.
Since a pipe invoked in /etc/aliases runs (or should run) unprivileged under
the "nobody" uid, I'm gathering that it does.
When procmail is invoked without the -m option, it tries to make sure it can
write to the compiled-in value for $ORGMAIL. Even if /etc/procmailrc or
the user's ~/.procmailrc will change it, procmail tries the compiled-in value
first. If /var/mail/998 or /var/mail/nobody does not exist and the uid of
the process does not have the power to creat files in /var/mail/, procmail
will whine, even if it can do the rest of its job. Assigning a value for
$ORGMAIL on procmail's command line doesn't seem to make a difference.
Alan posted a solution involving the /etc/procmailrcs/ directory that I'll
take his word for, since, not being a system administrator, I've no
experience with having procmail as the MDA. But I can tell you this:
if you use the -m option, procmail is supposed to start with $ORGMAIL unset.
So changing the alias to
"|/usr/local/bin/procmail -m /zen1/info/procmail"
might be all that you need to do. A couple other effects of -m are that
you must specify an rcfile name as the argument to the option, but you're
already doing that; and that procmail will, until told otherwise, stay cd'ed
to the directory that is current when it is fired up instead of cd'ing on
its own the the user's $HOME, but you already have taken care of that by
assigning $MAILDIR by a full path early in the rcfile.
David Tamkin