Fetchmail Complaining

lmcilwain · 07-18-2006, 10:45 PM

Hello all,

I'm having an issue that I need to try and have fixed. Fetchmail on my machine is complaining that it can't read my .procmailrc file in my home directory that is used for mail filtering.

What I am getting in my fetchmail log is:
procmail: Suspicious rcfile "/home/lmcilwain/.procmailrc"
procmail: Couldn't read "/home/lmcilwain/.procmailrc"

Nothing has changed with this file in months and all of a sudden it just stopped working.
Here are the permissions on my .procmailrc file:

-rw-r--r-- 1 lmcilwai lmcilwai 1484 18 Jul 23:34 .procmailrc

Can anyone help me figure out what in the world is going on with this?

gilead · 07-18-2006, 11:03 PM

According to man procmail:

Code:

Suspicious rcfile "x"  The  owner  of the rcfile was not the recipient or root, the file was
                       world  writable,  or  the  directory  that  contained  it  was  world
                       writable,  or this was the default rcfile ($HOME/.procmailrc) and ei-
                       ther it was group writable or the directory  that  contained  it  was
                       group writable (the rcfile was not used).

Alternatively, you have lmcilwain as the home directory name but you have lmcilwai as the user:group - is there a typo?

Do any of those possibilities fit your setup?

lmcilwain · 07-18-2006, 11:19 PM

No its not a typo that was what I cut and pasted right fromt he terminal.. My username is definitly not lmcilwai.

But how can I fix this. This user doesn't exist anywhere so I can't figure out a user ID that correspond to it to change the ownership.

Matir · 07-18-2006, 11:21 PM

What are the permissions on /home/lmcilwain?

lmcilwain · 07-18-2006, 11:22 PM

The permissions I have for my home directory is as follows:

drwxrwxrwx 77 lmcilwai lmcilwai 2618 19 Jul 00:10 lmcilwain

Matir · 07-18-2006, 11:25 PM

Because the directory is group/world-writable, it will not use the .procmailrc file for fear that someone else could have placed a malicious .procmailrc file there to obtain copies of your email. Try removing group and world write permissions.

gilead · 07-18-2006, 11:28 PM

Edit: Hopefully Matir's suggestions fixes the problem before you get to trying this...

On my system, I can create a user:group of lmcilwain:lmcilwain and the ownership displays correctly (doesn't truncate the last 'n'). Are the other files in that directory owned the same way? If so, does running the following as root work?

Code:

chown -Rc lmcilwain:lmcilwain /home/lmcilwain

If not, you should be able to type the following to get the uid:gid for the lmcilwain user:

Code:

id lmcilwain

If it returned (for example):

Code:

uid=1014(lmcilwain) gid=118(lmcilwain) groups=118(lmcilwain)

Then you could run:

Code:

chown -Rc 1014:118 /home/lmcilwain

Matir · 07-18-2006, 11:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gilead

On my system, I can create a user:group of lmcilwain:lmcilwain and the ownership displays correctly (doesn't truncate the last 'n'). Are the other files in that directory owned the same way? If so, does running the following as root work?

Code:

chown -Rc lmcilwain:lmcilwain /home/lmcilwain

If not, you should be able to type the following to get the uid:gid for the lmcilwain user:

Code:

id lmcilwain

If it returned (for example):

Code:

uid=1014(lmcilwain) gid=118(lmcilwain) groups=118(lmcilwain)

Then you could run:

Code:

chown -Rc 1014:118 /home/lmcilwain

Many setups truncate usernames to 8 characters (the original UNIX max username length). Others replace usernames > 8 chars with the numeric UID. I doubt it's mis-owned.

lmcilwain · 07-18-2006, 11:36 PM

Well it seems that the issue was that my user directory was set to world writeable. I didn't put two and two together...

I was working on trying to share a folder via smb on my system and I must have done something screwy. I went back to what I was doing and noticed that mistake (wierd). So I sent the permission as close to what I remember as possible and then checked my fetchmail and procmail logs and low and behold it is filtering again.

Procmail Log:
procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER=/var/mail/lmcilwain"
procmail: Opening "/var/mail/lmcilwain"
procmail: Acquiring kernel-lock
procmail: [6580] Wed Jul 19 00:30:58 2006
procmail: Notified comsat: "procmail.log@19***:/var/mail/lmcilwain"
From lmcilwain Wed Jul 19 00:30:56 2006
Subject: test
Folder: /var/mail/lmcilwain

Fetchmail Log:
procmail: [6580] Wed Jul 19 00:30:56 2006
procmail: Assigning "LOGNAME=procmail.log"
procmail: Assigning "LOGFILE=procmail.log"
procmail: Opening "procmail.log"

I do however want to fix the way my UID and GID ownership is displaying but I'm tempted to leave it as is if its working for me...

Thanks for the help guys, I really appreciate it.

Matir · 07-18-2006, 11:37 PM

Your owner and group are correct, it is just truncating to keep the columns in ls -l neatly lined up.

lmcilwain · 07-18-2006, 11:41 PM

OK, then I feel much better leaving it as it is. (Slowly but surely learning)

Matir · 07-18-2006, 11:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lmcilwain

(Slowly but surely learning)

That's what we're here for. I'm glad we were able to help you with this.