On Mon, 13 Sep 1999 18:00:05 -0400 (EDT), Nancy this-address-is-valid
McGough <nm(_at_)NoAdsPlease(_dot_)ii(_dot_)com> posted to the Procmail mailing
list
and the newsgroups comp.mail.misc and comp.mail.pine:
* Do my definitions of "string" and "word" make sense and do the use
of these words in the article make sense?
Do you think the average reader knows what a Venn diagram is (and
aren't they supposed to be balls, not rectangles? :-)
* I now use yes/no rather than on/off for the VERBOSE settings. Do
older versions of procmail support yes/no? (I changed this so it
is consistent with LOGABSTRACT's all/no settings. But maybe I
should use on/off for VERBOSE and all/off for LOGABSTRACT --
opinions?)
I think this yes/no (all) convention makes sense.
* What is the default folder directory for other mailers?
FWIW, I believe many of the Emacs mail readers will use your home
directory by default, although they are of course typically eminently
configurable. RMAIL and VM will by default use ~/RMAIL and ~/INBOX,
respectively, where these are files, not directories. (Dunno about
Gnus, probably somebody here uses that? I seem to recall the Gnus
instructions basically tell you to create a directory for mail.)
* What do you think is the best command for people to try first in
their .forward file? Is what I've got in step 2G the best?
Whatever works. What you have is probably fine for a system with
Sendmail and without smrsh. If you have a different MTA or you have
smrsh installed, it will not work. On the other hand, whatever works
with Qmail or for Sendmail with smrsh is not likely to be a great
success on "plain" Sendmail systems. This is a hassle to explain to
newbies, but I'm afraid that's the way it is.
* On some systems the .forward file will not be used if it is world
writable. Is this the case on *all* systems?
I think it's safest to advice users to not make their .forward
writable to others -- primarily for security reasons, regardless of
whether it will also break Procmail!
Older versions of Sendmail were probably less paranoid about this.
Don't know how far back you have to go, though. Recent versions will
certainly complain, and complain about a host of related issues, too
(no directory along the path to a critical file must be writable by
world, or in many cases group).
A related issue: As of Procmail 3.13 (or 3.12 but I guess nobody ever
settled on that) Procmail is more paranoid about the permissions on
the .procmailrc file, and will refuse to use it if it is group or
world writable. A frequent problem on some systems is that the users'
home directories are group writable but always belong to a group with
only one member, namely the user in question. This will make Procmail
upset unless it was configured at compile time to shut up about this.
(This is notably the case on Red Hat systems, although I believe they
fixed their precompiled RPM version of 3.13.1 now.)
Hope this helps,
/* era */
And thanks for listing me in "Thanks", although the link to my home
page seems to be hosed. :-)
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