Re: procmail and kmail

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Al" == Al Hudson <eah106 [at] york.ac.uk> writes:

    Al> On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Ross Henderson wrote:
    Ross> problem now is that i can't find a mail client to use the
    Ross> combination of sendmail, fetchmail & procmail.

    Al> Hmmm, we're getting MTAs, MUAs, etc. all confused again... why
    Al> is there no decent howto?!

Because he's using KDE, I would guess.  I don't know anybody else who
has the kind of problems that repeatedly come up on this list, always
associated with some K utility that most people love because it works
like a charm for them.

/usr/doc/HOWTO/mail{,-Administrator,-User}-HOWTO have always done the
job for me....  There are also a couple more specialized ones in
../mini.  But those don't apply when you're using an environment that
assumes the user doesn't have (at least, doesn't want to apply) the
brains necessary to pour water from a boot with instructions on the
heel.[1]  These configuration utilities get very confused if you try to
fix their little infelicities by hand, according to the HOWTOs.  The
HOWTOs assume you can simply write syntax appropriate for the config
file, but the config scripts invariably only accept a rigidly
formalized subset.

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.

<IRONY TYPE="gallows humor">
You probably won't get it right, but at least you'll have learned
enough to say something more informative than just "Haaaaaaaaaaaalp!"
when you next .post
</IRONY>

    Al> Well, my netscape has:
    Al> Preferences/Mail&Groups/Mail Server/Mail Server Type
    Al> .. which I set to:
    Al> Movemail application / External Application
    Al> .. which I set to:
    Al> /usr/sbin/movemail

    Al> I would imagine sendmail would work there too.

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.

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.

    Ross> xfmail says the mail file is corrupt because it doesn't have
    Ross> a 'from' line. i tried using procmail with the -f option,
    Ross> this hasn't helped.  balsa keeps crashing when it's been
    Ross> used a few times!

This sounds like (1) something is interfering with your incoming mail
spooler, and putting non-Unix-format mail there (2) procmail is not
actually getting invoked when you think it is.  I dunno about (1), but
(2) you can check by enabling logging in .procmailrc.


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.

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