🚀 go-pugleaf

"Ezio Paglia" <remove_ezio@comune.grosseto.it> writes:
...
> We are trying to configure the mailing system on our Linux Red Hat 6.1.  The
> default installation could work fine, yet, having to manage more than 3000
> accounts for Internet , we could not accept the default spool directory
> (i.e. /var/spool/mail).
> 
> We thought of following the approach of having a separate directory for
> every initial character of the account name.
> 
> For example an user dummy could have MAIL file =
> $BASE_DIRECTORY/d/dummy/mail.
> 
> In order to make this possible we modified the MAIL variable in
> /etc/login.defs file and created trivial automatic script for the creation
> of a generic user.
> 
> In spite of this we saw that the local delivery agent continued to write to
> /var/spool/mail/$LOGNAME.
> 
> After reading something about procmail we decided to have a .procmailrc for
> each user and a procmailrc on /etc, the former to allow the user some
> individual operations, the latter to discard some messages.
> 
> Everything seemed to work, even though I noticed that the system worked with
> the /var/spool/mail/* files (size 0). The use of mail on Linux was correct.

Procmail performs several checks on the permissions of a mailspool
before it starts processing the /etc/procmailrc and $HOME/.procmailrc
files.  For these checks it uses the compiled in location.  Thus the
zero length files in /var/spool/mail.

The correct way to set the mailspool location in procmail is to
recompile it with the correct value.  It can't get the information from
/etc/login.defs because procmail isn't started under login but rather by
the MTA (presumably sendmail in this case).

I would suggest you download procmail version 3.15pre, available at
    ftp://ftp.procmail.org/pub/procmail/testing/procmail-3.15pre.tar.gz

Untar it and edit the config.h file in the source tree.  You'll want to
put:
	#define MAILSPOOLHASH	1
	#define MAILSPOOLDIR	"/path/to/base/directory/"
	#define MAILSPOOLSUFFIX	"/mail"
and
	#define GROUP_PER_USER

in it.  The first three #defines tell procmail that the mailspool file
for a user "dummy" can be found at "/path/to/base/directory/d/dummy/mail"
The GROUP_PER_USER define tells procmail to accept group-writable
$HOME/.procmailrc files when the group is the user's default group
(RedHat systems have a group for each user and files are group-writable
by default).


> Moreover, having chosen the pop3 protocol I saw that nevertheless Eudora
> continued to find on /var/spool/mail again. Why ?

The pop3 daemon doesn't read the /etc/login.defs file either.  You'll
need to compile a new pop3 daemon that knows where to look.


Philip Guenther