procmail
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: 775 mail spool and "Bypassed locking"

1997-04-18 15:39:00
On Fri, 18 Apr 1997 16:40:31 -0500, Philip Guenther 
<guenther(_at_)gac(_dot_)edu> said:

$ ./procmail -f- VERBOSE=on < t
...
procmail: Bypassed locking "/var/mail/roderick.lock"
...

If you put a variable assignment on the command line, procmail will give
 up it's setuid and setgid privileges.

Thanks, I didn't realize that.

Without those privileges, procmail can't create the lockfile, so it
skips it.

This isn't the (only) cause here, though.  I created a ~/.procmailrc
which contains just

    LOGFILE = procmail.log
    VERBOSE = on

I invoked it as "./procmail < message" and I got the same results:

    procmail: [12334] Fri Apr 18 18:12:31 1997
    procmail: Bypassed locking "/var/mail/roderick.lock"
    [...]

The code in lockit() doesn't try to create the system lock file if
accspooldir isn't true, but accspooldir is only true if you use a world
writable spool dir.  Either I'm missing something, or nobody who uses
procmail uses a mode 775 group mail spool dir, or people who do don't
deliver mail to their system mail box, or they're loosing mail because
their MUAs and procmail aren't agreeing on the locking which is going on
and they just don't realize it.  procmail has such a great reputation
that I think I must just be missing something, but I haven't been able
to spot what.

-- 
Roderick Schertler
roderick(_at_)argon(_dot_)org