procmail
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Re: Problem with procmail on one local account.

2004-01-15 13:15:10
Professional Software Engineering wrote:

At 12:23 2004-01-15 -0600, ISMgr wrote:

Each of the users here has a .procmailrc that has been copied to the /home dir from a "master" copy that was initially created, and one particular user on this system is having a fit trying to receive mail....


Uhm, WHY? If you're running the same code for everyone, you can do that from /etc/procmailrc, and avoid having to copy a template all over the place. Besides, when you go to change something in the template ("master" copy), it won't auto propogate to the users (who may also have edited their individual copies) -- if you use /etc/procmailrc, you've got one file to edit, and it'll automatically be invoked for each user before their own .procmailrc (if any).

Perhaps you have specific design reasons for doing it the way you are, but it'd help in any event to become a bit more familiar with procmail so that you can use it in the most efficient way possible.

Hadn't done a global file because I hadn't done enough research on how to do it properly, and since we have different needs for spam control on a per-user basis, thought it would be OK to have individual .procmailrc files.



...it looks like procmail is having a hard time writing to a particular directory, but I don't know anything about procmail to know what it may be.


[snip - many lines relating to the SMTPd, not procmail]

Jan 15 12:13:52 atchisonkansas postfix/local[17801]: 62FBE1B8229: to=<postfix(_at_)atchisonkansas(_dot_)net>, relay=local, delay=0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: procmail: Couldn't create "/var/spool/mail/postfix" )

What does it mean when procmail says "Couldn't create /var/spool/mail/postfix"?


It means that procmail was directed to create a file named, /var/spool/mail/postfix, but lacked the permissions to do so. One could ask "what permissions does user "postfix" have to write to /var/spool/mail/ ?" However, I expect that the text of this error message might actually be _created_ by postfix in response to a _numeric_ return value from procmail, since postfix probably thinks mail would be delivered to that location, and procmail returned a write error result.

It'd be infinitely more helpful if you set a LOGFILE and ran VERBOSE logging in the procmailrc in question, and checked the output of that, correlating it to a specific recipe.

LOGFILE was already set and VERBOSE is now on.

One question, though - in looking at the maillog stamp above, it looks like the message was being routed to <postfix(_at_)atchisonkansas(_dot_)net> instead of the intended recipient. What in the world would cause postfix to want to hand it off to a mailbox other than the one it was addressed to?

Thanks!

Chris


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