expiring mail from root's Maildirs?

[@lbutlr]

On 2018-05-05 (06:52 MDT), Benny Pedersen <me at junc.eu> wrote:
> 
>> And yet it is.
> 
> in muttrc you miss ~ or $(HOME)/something

No.

>> Root has been aliased for decades. This has no impact on where and how
>> mutt stores the mail it sends as root out of root’s crontab.
> 
> root user can read mail files for all unix users, thats your fail, maybe crontab miss $(HOME) where it matters, but if it have and you start mutt as root it does not help, and you see the problem in allow root to do too much

There seems to be a basic misunderstanding here.

root has a crontab. Part of that crontab parses some system log files (that only root has access to) for user data and generates an email in HTML. That email is sent via mutt because the basic mail commands could not send an HTML email properly.

Mutt stores that email in ~root, and the email comes from the root user because that is who wins the crontab.

The $HOME fro the user is /root/

> i dont know mutt in detail, but its a fail to start mutt as root

Since the mail is generated out of root's cron, however the mail is sent, that process is going to be started by root.

> mutt must be started as some-other-unix-login

See above.

> the remaining fail is then in that users muttrc

There is nothing wrong in the root muttrc.

-- 
U is for UNA who slipped down a drain
V is for VICTOR squashed by a train