Re: [SM-USERS] Newby question (subfolders)

[Jon T. <jo...@tg...>]

> Just now learning Linux, for the past three weeks.
>
> Situation:  RedHat 7.2, Sendmail 8.11.6-3, UW-Imap-2001a, Qpopper
> (Pop3), and Squirrelmail 1.2.5.
>
> I have everything working except that I am having troubles with the
> users subfolders (trash, sent and drafts).  Just to make it easy while
> doing the configuration I have created a group called mailusers and put
> everyone in it.  I then ran: chgrp -R mailusers /var/spool/mail

This is the problem: you changed ownership of all the files in
the /var/spool/mail directory to group "mailusers".  /var/spool/mail should
be owned by root.mail (on RedHat, anyway) and filled with mailbox files for
each user on your system.  These mailbox files should be owned by the user
and serve as the INBOX in IMAP (and the entire mailbox for POP users).  For
example:

# ls -al /var/spool/mail/
total 8
drwxrwxr-x    2 root     mail         4096 Feb 21 18:19 .
drwxr-xr-x    9 root     root         4096 Jan 25 20:19 ..
-rw-rw----    1 jon      jon           123 Jan 26 15:23 jon
-rw-rw----    1 bob      bob           462 Jan 24 14:08 bob

Procmail, the Mail Delivery Agent used by default on RedHat systems, will
look for the mailbox file: /var/spool/mail/$USER and append the message to
the mailbox file running with the permissions of $USER.  Additional folders
like Trash and Drafts are created in the user's home directory.

> and then ran chmon -R 777 /var/spool/mail.

You mean chmod -R 777 /var/spool/mail, right?  This is quite dangerous, as
you are giving all users on the system full access to everyone else's
mail.  Procmail will deliver mail running as the permissions of the user,
so 660 permissions are much safer.

> I have three questions:
>
> 1.  Should the trash, sent and drafts files be at the same level as all
> the mail boxes or should there be a folder for the users mail boxes and
> all files go into each users mailbox?
>
These mailbox files: Trash, Sent, Drafts, etc. should be created in the
user's home directory (ie. /home/jon/Trash)

> 2.  What do I need to change so that my users can see into the
> subfolders?
>
> 3.  How should I set the permissions on the files and folders once I
> have everything setup for the best security?
>
Get rid of the mailusers group, as I believe RedHat already has a group
called "mail".  Run the following commands:

chown root.mail /var/spool/mail
chmod 775 /var/spool/mail
chmod 660 /var/spool/mail/*

Then for each user, run:
chown $USER.$USER /var/spool/mail/$USER

> Thanks for any help you provide.
>
Your're welcome.  Let me know if it works.

- Jon