🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <49783@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> TCHENG%AQUA.DECNET@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Tony C. Cheng, 5-7978@ETS) writes:
> [ lots of extraneous stuff]
>The local mail in this fashion was working fine on wright01.  The problem 
>comes from mails sent by remote hosts.  Mails from outside world will only
>be held in the /usr/spool/mqueue directory for a while and then bounced back 
>to their senders.  From those queued messages, we know that wright01 can
>definitely receive incoming mails from other hosts, but however, they cannot
>be appended to the /usr/mail/<login name> file.  Instead, the received mail
>will only cause wright01 to create a <login name>.lock file under that
>/usr/mail directory.  Which means that, for some reasons, "mailx" fails to
>recognize the /usr/mail as a postoffice or create a /usr/mail/<login name> 
>file to hold message for that <login name> user. 

Actually, the program that tries to append incoming mail to the user's
mailbox is whatever is defined in sendmail's config file as the "local"
mailer.  I assume in your case it's /bin/mail (not mailx).  /bin/mail
should tell you if it can't append to the mailbox file; unfortunately, it
isn't very good about saying exactly *why*.  So I assume you're getting
errors from /bin/mail in the transcript section of the returned mail saying
something like "cannot append to /usr/mail/username".

If you can use /bin/mail locally to deliver mail, and it only bounces
incoming remote mail, then this certainly suggests that it's dependent on
how sendmail is invoking it.  Check the permissions on the /usr/mail
directory, on /bin/mail (is it setuid?), and check the u and g options in
the sendmail.cf file, which determine what group and user id sendmail will
invoke the mailer under (if the mailer's S flag isn't set).  This should
all add up to a permissions problem making /bin/mail unable to open the
mailbox files.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Jeffe   ...uunet!cs.utexas.edu!ibmchs!auschs!sandino.austin.ibm.com!jeffe

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