Hi Philip,
On Sat, 20 Sep 1997, Philip Guenther wrote:
Daniel Suen <ttdsuen(_at_)ln(_dot_)edu(_dot_)hk> writes:
I have experienced a very strange problem with procmail v3.10. I used it
for my own account and put the .forward and .procmailrc in my home
directory. Then, it filtered those junk mails as expected. Then, I deleted
all those two files and I could receive emails as usual. For the next
couple of days, there does not seem to be any emails going to my account,
and I wonder what has gone wrong. I tried login other accounts on the
same machine and mailed a message to my account, and the mails had
evaporated. The mail.log said that the message had been "Sent", and I
found no clue about it. Then I tried putting back .forward and
.procmailrc into my home directory again, and everything goes alright as
usual. As I am the system administrator, I know exactly that the machine
does not use procmail globally.
Has any of you guys experienced such problem before? And, if you do, do
you know how I can delete .forward and .procmailrc and resumes my account
to function as before?
Sounds like the default local delivery agent (the one listed in the
sendmail.cf) is broken in some fashion. If you're on a sysVish system,
then the LDA may be expecting your mail spool to be mode 660, group
mail, though it _definately_ should be bouncing messages if it can't
deliver them. What's your platform, LDA, and mail spool modes?
Thanks for your suggestion. I don't think we are running LDA versions of
sendmail. As a matter of fact, I compiled and installed Sendmail 8.8.6 on
an HP-UX 10.10 machine. As to the "sendmail.cf" file, I followed the
Sendmail package instruction to create it, and it runs fine. As to the
local delivery agent, the default is to use "rmail", but as it does not
seem to return right error code, Eric Allman has made up a wrap up code
for me to that tries to return the right error code when unable to
deliver the mail due to quota problem. However, that does not seem to
work. I think I may have to use procmail as local delivery agent. But,
going back to the problem, I still do not see a clue. I had tried stopping
Sendmail and restarting it again, it does not solve my problem. I also
watched the time stamp /dev/null was last accessed(well, I hope the time
stamp is the one that I should be looking at), the mail does not seem to
go there either.
Note that if you don't want your mail to be filtered, you can leave
your .forward in place, and just delete/rename your .procmailrc, as
procmail will then default to just delivering every message to your
spool.
If you have the time to do so, I would suggest upgrading to procmail
version 3.11pre7, then making it the local delivery agent used by
sendmail.
Philip Guenther
daniel.