[CentOS] The case of the missing mail

Bart Schaefer barton.schaefer at gmail.com
Thu Dec 23 16:53:22 UTC 2010


On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 3:03 AM, Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> All the recipes work perfectly - it's just those that fall off the end. For
> some reason it overrides the DEFAULT setting in procmailrc.

I'm seeing messages from you about this on the procmail list as well
so pardon me if I've got my threads confused, but did you indicate
this has been happening some of the time for several days before you
noticed it?  Have you determined that it's consistent for any message
that "falls off the end" or is it intermittent?

If its consistent and there's a reasonably well-defined time that it
started happening, you should be looking for changes to the system
such as an automatically-applied update that occurred shortly before
the symptoms began.  However ...

Earlier in this thread you said MAILDIR=/home/anne/Maildir/ ... but
MAILDIR is procmail's equivalent of the shell's PWD, it has nothing to
do with delivery except as the path prefix if you use a relative path
name in a delivering recipe.  Assigning to MAILDIR is just a "cd".

Have you tried DEFAULT=/home/anne/Maildir/ ?

> This is a recent
> development, and in the log I see LASTFOLDER - is it possible that DEFAULT
> is no longer read and I need to define LASTFOLDER?

LASTFOLDER is informational, procmail sets it immediately before
delivering to that folder; if you see LASTFOLDER in your logs, the
only way the message should fail to arrive in that folder is in the
event of an error writing to that folder.

I don't recall whether setting DEFAULT to a pipe (e.g., to
delivermail) is supposed to work, but I wouldn't rely upon it.  In
some simple tests I tried, the pipe was never opened and the mail was
passed through to standard output.  Setting DEFAULT to a file or
directory worked.

If you haven't already, you really should add

LOGABSTRACT=all
VERBOSE=yes

to your procmailrc until you have resolved the problem.  This isn't a
guarantee that you'll be able to track it down but it'll help
eliminate a lot of possibilities.



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