Re: [bug-mailutils] sieve MDA

[Dimitrios Apostolou]

On Tuesday 20 June 2006 10:53, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> Dimitrios Apostolou <address@hidden> wrote:
> > $ mail.local -S test.sieve
> >
> > it just returns immediately without any error message and without
>
> It issues its diagnostics via syslog facility `mail'.
>
> > If I run it with my username at the end (why should I do
> > this if I run it as a user?)
>
> Because it is a local mailer: a program that is responsible for
> delivering mail to *various* users on the system. It is supposed to be
> executed by MTA with root privileges.
>
> > $ mail.local -S test.sieve jimis
> > blah blah
>
> Normally, the first input line is either a normal `From' envelope, or
> the beginning of the message body (headers).
>
> You don't need to execute mail.local yourself. All you need to do is to
> configure your MTA to use it as a local mailer. Then any user on the
> system can parse and redistribute his mail simply by creating an
> appropriately named Sieve (or Scheme) script in his home directory. This
> script will be executed by mail.local when delivering mail.

The problem is that I want to call it via fetchmail/getmail, not by the MTA, 
so root privileges is a little too much. Thanks for your answers, I now know 
that in mailutils there is no tool that does this specific job. 

However, would you think it would be worth fixing this behavior in mail.local? 
In particular I see 2 possible solutions: 
1) if mail.local already has the effective uid of the user specified on its 
command line, then it doesn't call setreuid(0,x) since it doesn't need to. 
2) A new command line option is implemented which makes mail.local work like 
procmail. No username should be specified on the command line.

Am I right? Do you think such changes would be easy to implement?


Dimitris