Owner and permissions of /var/mail/me

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 08:51:23AM -0400, Carthik Sharma wrote:
> I deleted the /var/mail/carthik (my username is carthik) file by mistake. If I
> were to create the file again, what should the permissions be, and who should
> be owner of that file?

I asked the same question of my Linux mentor a week or so
ago, after three or four years of my using Linux. The answer
should have occurred to me: drop to a command line and do

echo test | mail carthik

This will send a message to your account; your MDA will
automatically create /var/mail/carthik with all the right
permissions.

> Thanks, and would anyone know what the default smtp (mda?) in ubuntu is? I
> suspect it is postfix, but fear I am wrong.

It may be exim. I'm not actually sure.

> Does anyone have a link to a postfix + fetchmail + procmail + mutt + gnupg +
> spamassassin story or webpage to share?

Kind of a big question, isn't it? I use postfix, fetchmail,
procmail, mutt, gnupg and spamassassin. What do you want to
know? Here's my .fetchmailrc:

	poll [host] with proto imap:
		plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd" auth ssh fetchall
	set daemon 300

I.e., it uses SSH to connect to the remote host, run imapd,
catch imapd's stdout, and download it. Which is good.

Postfix: I relay my mail through an external host that
handles all of this stuff (and itself uses postfix,
incidentally).

Procmail: lots of inbound mail-processing rules, most quite
simple and of the "File into a mailbox if the sender is
[foo]" variety.

Mutt: I am the mutt mastah. :-) Ask any questions you'd
like. I think my favorite mutt hack is this script:

http://laniels.org/scripts/gpg_get_keys.pl.txt

Mutt currently isn't very smart with GPG. You need to
manually specify which users will receive encrypted emails
and which won't. The way it *should* work is that if your
receipients are in your GnuPG keyring, they receive an
encrypted message. That's what the above script does. Try it
out at the command line and you'll see what it does. Then in
your ~/.muttrc just do

source '~/bin/gpg_get_keys.pl|'

Spamassassin: it Just Works. After I had it whitelist all
the addresses in all my mailboxes, it did the job without
many false positives.

Ask any questions you might have. I find all of this stuff
fun.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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