Hi,

I am trying to create a user account WITH email at the command line. When I create an account with 'useradd' no email account is created. However when I use the RH 8 Gui tool and create a user, it does create an email account.

I am accessing the Email remotely using Sendmail and IMAP, and I need the ability to create accounts remotely by using Telnet or SSH.

Anyone know how to do this? I have searched in vain, it seems like it would be such a simple thing to do, in fact I would've thought it would be a useradd switch..

Any help would be MUCH appreciated.

G.

The user account should have an incoming email "folder" with useradd, or, at least it used to with RH. I'm not sure what you mean by email account.

If you look in /var/spool/mail you'll see all the inbound email user spool files. All users should have a file ('account') there if they are created with useradd <username>

Now, what you do with that file is a different story You might try installing a text email client, like Pine, or Elm, and see if it can see that same email box.

Thanks,
Jon

Have you tried useradd -m so that the home directory is created automatically?

The /var/spool/mail/[i]username[/] is created automatically when a user has mail.

Thanks for all your replies. Jon not sure what you mean by an incoming folder, if I look at the home directory of users created with the GUI (these are the ones that work fine with Sendmail) I see the following files:

Drafts
.mailboxlist
Sent Items

Those do NOT appear in the users directories created from the command line.

I did however check in /var/spool/mail and it appears all the users have entries in there.

Another little twist is that if I try to Mail the users (created from the command line) it seems to accept the mail address and they dont bounce back, but the users never get the mail. Also if I type 'sendmail -bv username' sendmail will say that the address is deliverable. However if I try accessing the user account using IMAP, again it doesnt appear to exist.

This is driving me crazy!

Also I did try creating a user with 'useradd - m' to see if thats make a difference and it does not.

Can the user login via IMAP? If you create the files manually, can the user see and use them?

Thanks everybody for your help. After some trial and error, it seems that this works with useradd providing that a password change is issued using 'passwd'. If useradd is issued either with password (-p) or without I am unable to login to sendmail via IMAP.

Once sendmail access the account the relevant files are setup in /home/user, so I was incorrect in thinking they should be there first.