procmailrc question

[Rick Stevens]

Waldher, Travis R wrote:
> 
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Bob McClure Jr [mailto:robertmcclure at earthlink.net]
>>Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 4:23 PM
>>To: Getting started with Red Hat Linux
>>Subject: Re: procmailrc question
>>
>>On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 04:02:00PM -0800, Waldher, Travis R wrote:
>>
>>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>>From: Bob McClure Jr [mailto:robertmcclure at earthlink.net]
>>>>Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 3:50 PM
>>>>To: Getting started with Red Hat Linux
>>>>Subject: Re: procmailrc question
>>>>
>>>>On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 03:41:27PM -0800, Waldher, Travis R wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Ok.. good question here.
>>>>>
>>>>>If I don't want an /etc/.procmailrc, and I have users that have
> 
> an
> 
>>>>>invalid $HOME path on the sendmail server, how can I support
>>>
>>>.procmailrc
>>>
>>>>>files for those users as procmail only appears to look at
>>>>>$HOME/.procmailrc.
>>>>
>>>>Not true.  Procmail looks at /etc/procmailrc (not
> 
> /etc/.procmailrc)
> 
>>>>and then at $HOME/.procmailrc.  Note also that the latter must be
>>>>owned by the user and be writable only by that user (644 perms).
>>>>
>>>>I'm curious.  What users have an invalid $HOME, and why?
>>>
>>>In short, I have a mess here.
>>>
>>>We have multiple user account file systems.  The one for our
> 
> sendmail
> 
>>>server is say /acct, the one for our HP machines would be /acct.hp.
> 
> But
> 
>>>our sendmail server also mounts that so mail can be handled
> 
> properly.
> 
>>>The problem is, I can't create user directories in /acct, even if
> 
> it's
> 
>>>just to put a .procmailrc link to their /acct.hp directory.
>>>
>>>So I need procmail to be able to use /acct/username/.procmailrc
>>>(otherwise known as $HOME) and /acct.hp/username/.procmailrc.
>>>
>>>Hope that made some sense.
>>
>>Hmm.  Well, sendmail determines each user's HOME directory from
>>/etc/passwd.  That (his HOME) is where the user's .procmailrc should
>>reside.  How does that relate to the two user worlds?
> 
> 
> On an HP, their home directory would be /acct.
> 
> On a linux box their home directory would be /acct
> 
> On an SGI their home directory would be /acct
> 
> The problem is, none of those are the same files system. :(

Did you ever see my responses?  I repeat:

You can set up the "ForwardPath" option in the sendmail.cf file to give
a list of directories to search for the .forward file.  For example,
this line:

     O ForwardPath=/usr/local/etc/forwards/$u.forward:$z/.forward

If the incoming mail was for user "fred", that line would cause the
system to first look for a "/usr/local/etc/forwards/fred.forward" file
If found, it is used.  If not, it tries to find a ".forward" file in
fred's home directory.  The system defaults to:

     O ForwardPath=$z/.forward.$w:$z/.forward

"$z" is filled in with the user's home directory after sendmail does a
getpwent()-style call, "$w" is filled in with the host name of the
machine running sendmail.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-    I don't suffer from insanity...I enjoy every minute of it!      -
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