Procmail – Why Procmail Ignores User Settings

dovecotpostfixprocmail

I use procmail for filtering emails in combination with postfix.
procmail is triggered by postfix via the in the main.cf mailbox_command

mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail -t -a "$EXTENSION"

but in the master.cf

procmail unix    n    n    -    20    pipe
    flags=R user=vmail argv=/usr/bin/procmail -o SENDER=${sender} -m USER=${user} EXTENSION=${extension}

I do not understand exactly but it seems to me that the two are not the same command
Is it possible that this situation is the reason why procmail is ignoring the user setting un the /home/user/.procmailrc ?

if we take a look to the procmail logs we see that 

From info@some_spam_domain.com  Sat Mar  1 17:10:24 2014
 Subject: ***** SPAM 27.4 ***** Hi i'm Masha 22 yo. do you have web camera?
  Folder: /usr/lib/dovecot/deliver -m Junk -d hans                       4202

it is actually using dovecot to deliver the emails.
hans is a user and JUNK is a folder defined in the main /etc/procmailrc as

DROPPRIVS=no    
DELIVER="/usr/lib/dovecot/deliver"
SPAMORDNER="$DELIVER -m Junk -d $USER"

:0 w
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
| $SPAMORDNER

I have there in my procmailcf

DROPPRIVS=no

DROPPRIVS=no works with -d, but turns off the user .procmailrc
DROPPRIVS=yes forced procmail to act as user witch has as result that deliver works without -d and it delivers to /var/mail/
And here we get closer to the point I do not understand.

turning on DROPPRIVS seems to work only if the user has a .prcocmailrc in his home folder,
because I can define there to deliver to /home/ else the mails are delivered to /var/mail/ and its in mbox format instead of maildir format

I supose the workaround would be something like this (exemple in pseudocode) in /etc/procmailrc 

if exist  /home/<username>/.procmailrc
    set DROPPRIVS=yes
else
    set DROPPRIVS=no

how do I write this in procmail language ?

Best Answer

the solution seems to be this

TMPFILE="$HOME/.procmailrc"
:0 w
* ?test -f $TMPFILE
{
    DROPPRIVS=yes
}

:0 Ew
* !test -f $TMPFILE
{
    DROPPRIVS=no
}

it works perfect, but there seems to be a bug that writes the following in the log file

procmail: Executing "test -f $TMPFILE"
procmail: Match on "test -f $TMPFILE"
procmail: Assigning "DROPPRIVS=yes"
procmail: Assuming identity of the recipient, VERBOSE=off
procmail: Program failure (75) of "/usr/lib/dovecot/deliver"

I am not able to understand who set this VERBOSE=off, because its not in my procmailrc it seems to be somewhere in the code of deliver.

anyway after this line it jumps correctly to the user .procmailrc and executes it without failure. so this failure seems to be just a cosmetic one.

P.S. the best way to understand a problem is to try to explain it to someone else :))

Related Topic