expiring mail from root's Maildirs?

Aki Tuomi aki.tuomi at dovecot.fi
Sat May 5 20:19:40 EEST 2018


> On 05 May 2018 at 20:14 "@lbutlr" <kremels at kreme.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

You could use tool like sudo or su to run mutt as non-root, instead of running it as root?

Aki


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