Re: procmail and kmail

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> My advice is to ditch the K environment, read the HOWTOs mentioned
> above, and start over by hand.  Especially avoid reusing anything
> produced by automatic config utilities that seems to be working!  It
> probably isn't but you will find the bugs hard to spot since the
> config utility probably got it 99% right, and only screwed up on
> something obscure.

Hoohoo ! I have to say, I've never had a problem with K, but then, I don't
use local mailboxes.

> Nooooooo!  It will not.  All movemail is, is a glorified cp that (1)
> is carefully set up to be secure as a setugid application where that
> is necessary, (2) understands file locking protocols used by the local
> mail system, and (3) is careful to verify that the copy succeeded
> before deleting the /var/spool/mail/$LOGNAME file.  As far as sendmail
> is concerned, /var/spool/mail/$LOGNAME is write-only so it can't do
> movemail's job.

Yes, you're right, I should read the manual before blurting ;)) 

> If my guess based on Edit | Preferences | Mail & News | Mail Server
> dialog is correct, Netscape forwards all mail to a "smarthost" for
> relay by internally implemented SMTP; it does not use
> /usr/lib/sendmail directly at all.

Hmm, seems so. I guess you can setup smtp on localhost, and use that, but
seems a trifle o.t.t...

> Footnotes: 
> [1]  This is not a criticism of any users; anybody who is smart enough
> to choose Linux is smart enough to use it in my book.  It is a
> criticism of the assumptions made by the scripts.

I would say, in defence of scripts, most of the good ones work 99% of the
time. If they don't work for you, then you're obviously doing something so
particular that you ought to know what you're doing anyway. But true, bad
scripts can be worse than no scripts....

Cheers,

Alex.


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