Hello, On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 10:49:50PM -0500, David Wright wrote: > On Mon 13 Mar 2017 at 03:05:31 (+0000), Andy Smith wrote: > > On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 10:55:05AM +0000, Sharon Kimble wrote: > > > In an effort to get gnus to read root emails I've chowned > > > /var/mail/mail, added myself to the 'mail' group, changed the > > > permissions of /var/mail/mail, and generally frigged around with it.
[…] > > I would start by putting the correct ownership and permissions back > > on /var/mail/mail. It is normally owned by mail:mail with mode 0600. > > It might make it clearer to write: > /var/mail/foo is owned by foo:mail with mode 0600, > /var/mail/bar is owned by bar:mail with mode 0600, > etc. The file in question was actually /var/mail/mail and if it exists it will be owned by mail:mail on Debian, though. > I would just add that I don't think I've ever had mail sent to user > "mail" by anything, and so I've never observed a file called /var/mail/mail. It's where mail for root goes to if delivered locally to an mbox format spool file. At no point does a /var/mail/root get created as the system won't want to run an MDA as root and this also avoids having to run an MUA as root to read it. But best practice is to send root's email to a regular user or list of users. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
