jjcrump@milton.u.washington.edu (James Crump) (05/07/91)
A friend in our consulting office posted this for me a few weeks ago but I got no response. I had thought the problem had gone away but now, without warning, it has returned. Is this a bug (being such a tyro I wouldn't know a bug if it bit me on the nose) or am I doing something wrong? The UNIX flavor we're running here is DYNIX(R) V3.0.17 and the ELM version is ELM 2.3 PL11 My filter rules work correctly, saving to their respective files the mail I recieve addressed to the multiple recipients of the ansax-l and humanist mailing lists. Things go along fine for a while and I receive my regular mail in my incoming mailbox. Then, for no apparant reason, my regular mailbox in /usr/spool/mail disappears, and the incoming message is dumped into my home directory in a file called EMERGENCY_MBOX. Does anyone have a clue? The contents of the relevant files are listed below. #### my filter-rules file in the .elm directory reads as follows: if (to contains "ansax-l") then save "/u8/jjcrump/Mail/Lists/ansax-l" if (to contains "humanist") then save "/u8/jjcrump/Mail/Lists/humanist" #### .forward file in my root directory reads as follows: "|/usr/local/bin/filter -vo /u8/jjcrump/filt.errs" #### the -vo flags produce a filt.errs file which reads thus: filter (jjcrump): Mailing message to jjcrump filter (jjcrump): Couldn't create lockfile filter (jjcrump): Can't open mailbox /usr/spool/mail/jjcrump! filter (jjcrump): Using /u8/jjcrump/EMERGENCY_MBOX as emergency mailbox Any help would be gratefully received, as I am baffled and so are the people in our consulting office. posting to this group or mail directly to me would be appreciated. Jon Crump jjcrump@milton.u.washington.edu
eric@cinnet.com (Eric Bardes) (05/09/91)
From article <1991May6.175240.19159@milton.u.washington.edu>, by jjcrump@milton.u.washington.edu (James Crump): > the incoming > message is dumped into my home directory in a file called > EMERGENCY_MBOX. I had the same problem and figured it out yesterday. Small world :) The mail spool directory was owned by root, group mail, mode 775. The filter program was running without any special permissions. Therefore, it could not create the lock file which keeps other mail processes from writing to that mailbox. I presume your other folders are in or under your home directory. Filter could and was able to create lock files there. The cure - choose one: 1) Have your sysadm change filter to run setgid mail. 2) Change the mail directory to have a mode of 777. __ |_ _ . _ Eric E. Bardes, User eric@cinnet.com |__ | | |_ Cincinnati Public Access Un*x uunet!uceng.uc.edu!cinnet.com!eric