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RE: [OT] Re: Writing to users mailboxes

2004-11-08 06:55:46
Hello Robert,

the basic logic behind the mail system is quite easy:
first you've got a mail transport agent, second a mail delivery agent.

The MTA is only responsible for transporting mails, i.e. receiving mails and
handing them to other mailservers or calling the MDA to deliver the mail.
It's normally run by root and therefore has root rights.

The MDA is responsible for delivering mail for local users to their mailboxes.
It's called by the MTA and run with the user-id of the recipient and therefore
with the users rights.

If you set up procmail as your MDA, it's invoked everytime, when a mail for
e.g. local user sabine arrives and is run under her user-id and $HOME is set
accordingly to /home/sabine (or whatever you set up to be her homepath) and
procmail will execute /home/sabine/.procmailrc.

Fetchmail itself is also able to deliver mail to mailboxes, but you should have 
it
hand messages to your MTA in order to have it invoke procmail and avoid
problems with permissions (remember: MTA is run as root.)

Hope that cleared something for you
M. Freiling


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