On Sun, 3 Feb 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On 02-Feb-2002 Tzafrir Cohen wrote: > > On Sat, 2 Feb 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > >> I'm trying to help a friend (not on the list)who just installed Mandrake 8.1 > >> and haven't succeeded in solving this. It's is probably a stupid question, > >> but I've looked at all the relevant man pages and I'm obviously missing > >> something. > > > > Is there an *important* reason that root should read the mail directly? > > Consider the factthat security fixes were issued for both mutt and pine > > recently. > > > > Is there a good reason why the mail is not forwarded to a certain local > > user? > > > > See: http://www.postfix.org/faq.html#root > > > Of course you're right that root should not be a **regular** user and should > not be logged on to read mail. My question really arose because of the > difference between my box and my friend's. I couldn't see why my root account > got mail and his didn't since we both have MDK 8.1. After reading your answer > and the FAQ you pointed to, it occured to me that there is a difference after > all. My friend has a new MDK 8.1 box and mine was updated from 8.0. It seems > that when I updated, I didn't update postfix so was running a much older > version - I guess from before the security fix that won't allow mail to root.
This feature is older than that. An upgrade probably has upgraded all of the software, but left in-tact the config files. BTW: you should go over leftover .rpmnew files. > > BTW - since both my friend and I have home machines only, I admit that despite > all of the above, we both regularly log on as root and are not too worried > about security issues. Please no flames - so far, in four years of running > Linux, I only did serious damage once, and that was on an occaision when I > probably would have had to log on as root anyway. [fighting myself to avoid writing a flame. Here is something which is not a flame] It is not only a matter of security, but also of convinince: you won't get to read this mail until you login as root. Why bother reading two different mailboxes. BTW: if you don't want to read root's mail as part of the standard mailbox (if it annoys you), then in your main.conf set: recipient_delimiter = + (unrem this line) and in your aliases file: root: auser+root Then user auser could easily filter out root's mail to a different folder, by adding a file ~/.forward+root which will contain: /home/auser/mail/root and read the mailbox from /home/auser/mail/root . -- Tzafrir Cohen /"\ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign Taub 229, 972-4-829-3942, X Against HTML Mail http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir / \ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
