In order to demonstrate without need for back-and-forth inquiries and
explanations and assurances that I am in point of fact root/superuser, I
perform system administration as root.
I am aware that many people militate against usage of "root" for email,
but use of any other account opens the question as to whether or not the
account in question really is the superuser. Use of the genuine "root"
account solves that problem. Also, a large amount of automatically
generated mail is from root, so to ensure that my followup mail about any
such matters gets sorted into the same "from" folders on the recipients
machine it is necessary that I write as "root" when writing about uch
matters.
Thus there are a whole slew of good reasons why I do in fact need to use
"root" for email. That being the case, I heven evolved a large and complex
set of mail filters on the "root" account.
I have recently changed my mail system on all systems I control from smail
to sendmail, using procmail as the local delivery agent.
I do not have, nor desire, any mail filtering on any account other than
root. One reason for that is that my mail filters were based on "deliver".
Admittedly I could use "deliver" as my local delivery agent. ButProcmail
appears to be more of a standard and supports the SmartList mailing list
manager so I am attempting to work with procmail. This has not been made
easier by the fact that my submissions to its mailing list appear to be
vanishing into limbo. I have had to bounce them to my personal account -
an account which should not have to get clogged up with programming crap
that properly is root's concern not markm's concern - and from there
re-bounce them to the list. Even then I do not know if they will make it.
I may have to use "forward" or quote them or something to get them to
work.
I do not wish to use filters, hence mailing-lists either, on any account
other than root because of problems regarding filtering, problems which I
have attempted to discuss on the list, but even the attemnpt to discuss
the problems is not working thus far.
I could see going back to deliver for root's filtering. I cannot keep
going back and forth for multiple users, so it is good that I only use
root for programming stuff so only have one account I need to mess with to
get filtering working again.
If people would like an extended discussion of the pros and cons of using
"root" for email I would be happy to discuss the issue in depth in some
appropriate venue, I am not convinced this is the milieu for that though.
The crux of this is I am attempting to discuss problems I am having in
attempting to use procmail as local delivery, and filtering, agent. Part
of what I would like to use it for is filtering mailing-list mail. If I
can get it working then perchance it may become practical to use accounts
other than root for list email. Until then it i not practical. The degree
of difficulty I am having leads me to think it still will not be practical
because I do not want to have more than one account's mail filters to
screw around with if another change to another system happens down the
line sometime. Keeping absolutely all programming/administration concerns
strictly restricted to the "root" account will always mean only ONE
account is affected by such changes.
I will re-send AGAIN the items that vanished, if they do not appear
shortly.
By the way this fiasco has me now in favour of not restricting posting to
subscribers. I am subscribed as lists-in(_at_)knotwork(_dot_)com because I
could not
subscribe as root. I had lists-in alias a long time ago because some
other lists also would not let root subscribe. I am not aware of any of
them vanishing root's postings into limbo though.
If anyone knows how to tell pine to put lists-in as my username on the
From: line when posting to certain addresses, that would be handy... I am
not aware of a means of email address spoofing in pine, I can change my
domain but seemingly not my username?
Blessed Be. -MarkM-
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