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Question about INBOX permissions

2004-08-10 08:41:10
How unusual, a question that's not about recipes!

My mail server's /var/spool/mail is currently rwxr-sr-x or 2755, is owned by sys:sys. This is a legacy from an exceedingly clever previous system admininstrator. The inboxes themselves are 600 and owned by <userid> and grouped a third as sys, the rest as mail. Messy, like any box that's been around awhile.

My procmail is 3.22, running as root:sys. There are no users on this mail server; it serves via IMAP. Currently, I have an about-to-be-replaced login server running an old version of Pine that NFS mounts the home mail and INBOX directory.

My new login server (which will use IMAP to access the mail rather than through NFS mounts) has a new version of Pine, is, of course, nattering at me that /var/spool/mail *should* be 1777 or rwxrwxrwt. I am contemplating doing this, for pine's author makes a good case.
I see that /var/spool/mail on Linux is 1775.

Are there reasons NOT to set my mail server's /var/spool/mail to 1777?

This is an embarassingly basic question but not without its subtleties. There are apparently different camps on how to do this, related to the old Berkeley vs. System V differences. The mail server is AIX5, which is a mixture of both (isn't that helpful?). I have searched online about this and swotted my books, but come up with not much more than 'Here there might be dragons'.

I'd appreciate your comments, suggestions, warnings...especially on gotchas of the sort, "you'll think everything is fine, then a week later...."
--
====
Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources
Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York  12504
sdean(_at_)bard(_dot_)edu  voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035



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