Subject: Re: Procmail from pseudo-accounts

From: [email-masked] (Stephen R. van den Berg)
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 1994 15:20:07 +0200

Jason Haar <[email-masked]> wrote:
>I was wondering; could procmail be set up on an account with a /bin/false
>shell?

>Setting the shell to /bin/false certainly stops an account from being
>accessed, but it also breaks procmail if it is called from .forward. I
>supposed sendmail is doing a "/bin/false procmail ..."?

For both the .forward and the aliases mechanism, the login shell has
no direct relevance whatsoever.  Sendmail always uses /bin/sh (as specified
by the Mprog mailer in sendmail.cf).  SmartList uses the aliases mechanism
exclusively.

If procmail is Mlocal, then the .forward files becomes unnecessary, in which
case there is absolutely no shell in between sendmail and procmail.

The only two things to watch out for:
- Sendmail 8.x requires /bin/false (in this case) to be in /etc/shells.
- In the .procmailrc file, you should set SHELL=/bin/sh (SmartList already
  does this).

-- 
Sincerely,                                  [email-masked]
           Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless).

He did a quarter of the work in *half* the time!

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 08:24:19 PDT

Why set up a dedicated account at all.  Why not instead just create an
alias in /etc/aliases and point it to procmail, e.g.
test: "|IFS=' ' && exec /alocaldir/procmail -f- /alocaldir/procmailrc || exit 75 #test"

Is there a security issue here?  the procmailrc shouldn't be world
writeable.

	geoff

---

From: Jason Haar <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 1994 16:45:34 GMT

On Sep 23,  8:24am, [email-masked] wrote:
> Subject: Re: Procmail from pseudo-accounts
>-- End of excerpt from [email-masked]

Paranoia? :-)

Personally I feel if you are going to have an account that will alter files
on the system, then it should be run from a userid set up for the purpose. If
you run things totally within sendmail (via extra mailers definitions/etc),
then you will be running things as userid root or daemon (depending on how
your MTA is configured). It should be daemon - but this is a "special"
account and I don't like the idea of it doing anything besides mail delivery
- I'd rather have another account I could potentially log into if needed/etc.

Personal preferences I suppose, I prefer Coffee to Tea too! ;-)

Jason