Since running up2date on my server I have procmail and qmail fighting over my mail folder.

The system is configured to use qmail and seems to (still) do fine for mail arriving from the outside world. The mail is delivered to $HOME/Mailbox

When I'm on the server itself and send mail ie: "mail webmaster" it somehow invokes procmail. procmail decides it doesn't like the symbolic link from /var/mail/webmaster to /home/webmaster/Mailbox and renames it as BOGUS.webmaster.something

I fought long and hard with the system to get it to use qmail and $HOME/Mailbox and all was working fine until that last update. I'm assuming either one of the RPMs changed something to start using procmail that wasn't before or it gave me a new version of procmail where the old had been patched to avoid this behavior.

I figure I have three options:
1) undo the thing that's now using procmail if I can find it
2) patch procmail to use $HOME/Mailbox
3) switch to use /var/spool/mail

Any ideas?

Your qmail are using procmail as its MDA. You can change the default MDA on /var/qmail/control/aliasempty. Qmail also has MDA capability, just put './Mailbox' in your aliasempty to let qmail handle that.

Hmm. I tried that but no luck. I didn't have an aliasempty file in /var/qmail/control so I created it with just a ./Mailbox in it but no luck.

/var/qmail/rc did have a |procmail in it but I changed that to ./Mailbox

It seems that it's sendmail that's calling procmail. I'm really not all that familiar with all this but here's the relevant lines from /var/log/maillog:


Jan 11 16:34:57 tv sendmail[9293]: g0BLYv709293: from=root, size=34,
class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<200201112134.g0BLYv709293@tvtome.com>,
relay=root@localhost
Jan 11 16:35:13 tv procmail[9298]: Renamed bogus
"/var/spool/mail/webmaster" into
"/var/spool/mail/BOGUS.webmaster.iz2"
Jan 11 16:35:13 tv sendmail[9297]: g0BLYv709293: to=webmaster,
ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=00:00:16, xdelay=00:00:16, mailer=local,
pri=30034, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent

Originally posted by jnestor

It seems that it's sendmail that's calling procmail. I'm really not all that familiar with all this but here's the relevant lines from /var/log/maillog:


Whoa, kill that sendmail :). It is possible that your up2date updated your sendmail. To ensure that won't happen again, you need to uninstall sendmail, and not just not using it :)

Yeah, you're right. I realized that before I had senmail as a symbolic link to /var/qmail/bin/sendmail. up2date must have installed a real version of sendmai again. I removed it and put back the links and all is well. Thanks for your help.

Now to tell up2date to not install sendmail ...