Fetchmail Complaining

[Paul Howarth]

On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 00:02 -0700, jdow wrote:
> From: "Cameron Simpson" <cs at zip.com.au>
> 
> > On 18Jul2006 23:46, Lovell Mcilwain <lovell.mcilwain at gmail.com> wrote:
> > | Fetchmail on my machine is complaining that it can't read my .procmailrc file
> > | in my home directory that is used for mail filtering.
> > | What I am getting in my fetchmail log is:
> > | procmail: Suspicious rcfile "/home/lmcilwain/.procmailrc"
> > | procmail: Couldn't read "/home/lmcilwain/.procmailrc"
> > 
> > It would be nicer if it said "refusing to read"...
> > 
> > | Nothing has changed with this file in months and all of a sudden it just
> > | stopped working.
> > | Here are the permissions on my .procmailrc file:
> > | -rw-r--r-- 1 lmcilwai lmcilwai 1484 18 Jul 23:34 .procmailrc
> > 
> > Is your home directory group or world writeable?
> > If so, procmail reckons someone could have replaced your .procmailrc.
> 
> It also seems world or group readable is not likely to be acceptable.
> Set it to -rw------.

World and group readable is perfectly fine. It is in fact the
traditional way that home directories (and just about everywhere else)
were set on Unix systems, on the basis that everyone could explore
everywhere on the filesystem other than places they *really* shouldn't
have access to, and thereby learn things. Locking down home directory
permissions is a relatively new thing.

Anyway, I have permissions -rwxr-xr-x on my home directory and procmail
works just fine.

Paul.