[sclug] Problem with postfix & maildrop

[Roland Turner SCLUG]

Tom Chance wrote:


> I'm having some trouble with my postfix & maildrop configuration.
> Receiving  and delivering mail works OK, but the system is building up
> a growing list of  deferred messages of the kind:
>
> $ postqueue -p
> -Queue ID- --Size-- ----Arrival Time---- -Sender/Recipient-------
> A31E5202A5     1810 Thu Jun  2 23:26:02  root at acrewoods.net
> (temporary failure. Command output: /usr/bin/maildrop: Unable to change
> to  home directory.)
>                                         root at acrewoods.net


Wild guess: you don't have root aliased to a non-super-user account, so
it's trying to actually deliver to a "root" mail folder which, ordinarily,
it should not be allowed to do. Is this so?

> I've searched for this problem, and the only solution I found was to
> give the  maildrop binary suid permissions, which I did to no avail:
>
> $ ls -l /usr/bin/maildrop
> -r-sr-sr-x  1 root mail 149032 Aug 21  2004 /usr/bin/maildrop


Erk! Generally you don't want to run your MDA suid root. (Or, more to the
point, generally you don't want to be granting suid root privileges to
programs that don't already have them.)

- Raz