Re: [Exim] never_users = root if exim_user != root ?

On Wed, Sep 29 1999, Andromeda wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Sep 1999 10:35:45 +0100, Philip Hazel wrote:
>
> > It's always a matter of preference. It's just a safety catch to ensure
> > it will *never* do a local delivery as root, whatever you do to the rest
> > of the configuration.
>
> Now the question remains... is it a good thing to let it run as root for
> local delivery? How would one deliver mail to the root user (as the
> administrator of the machine)?

You _really_ don't want to do that in any case. As you should never ever log in as root except for admin tasks - and even then use root as little as possible, and certainly not to read your mail - I have an entry in the aliases file which redirects root's mail (as well as postmaster and a few others) into my user account.

In fact, I'm sure that is what was _recommended_ in a comment in the aliases file before I even touched it!

However, if you _still_ want to do this, create a group (exim_group) with just your exim_user in it, then:
chgrp exim_group roots_mailbox
chmod 660 roots_mailbox
exim can now write to the mailbox but no-one else can except root. I haven't tried that, but I'm sure it'll work :-)

--
David Cantrell, sysadmin, barnyard.co.uk