[CentOS] The case of the missing mail

Wed Dec 22 16:51:02 UTC 2010
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>

On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Anne Wilson wrote:

> On Wednesday 22 December 2010 13:33:10 Anne Wilson wrote:
>> I became suspicious that I should have received a certain message, 
>> and reading pm.log I discovered that it had indeed arrived and had 
>> been allocated to /var/mail/anne, despite procmailrc telling it 
>> that
>>
>> MAILDIR=/home/anne/Maildir/
>>
>> Any idea what might have caused this?  It seems to have been 
>> working like this only in the last 24 hours or so.
>>
> Also, since /var/mail/anne is mbox and /home/anne/Maildir/ is 
> maildir, I need to find a way of getting the messages into the 
> correct directory.  I could clip them into separate files, but I 
> assume that the cryptic names of files are used for indexing.

There are a few things that are likely to cause the symptoms you 
describe:

  1. Lax permissions on ~/.procmailrc: make sure that file isn't
     accessible by group or world (0600 works for me).

  2. Lax permissions on your $HOME. Procmail gets picky when
     things are group-writeable.

  3. SELinux issues. Run "ausearch -m avc | grep procmail" to
     see if anything needs to be relabeled.

/var/log/maillog will usually supply part of the answer as well.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/