mailpost woes

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi Nick,

[Shouldn't doc/pod/mailpost.pod be directly included in frontends/mailpost.in
and the corresponding man page generated from it?  or is there a good reason
for this man page not to be included in the script?]


> The man page says the following about the -b option in mailpost:
>
> This option may be required if the mailpost process doesn*t have write
> access to the news tmp directory (the value of pathtmp in inn.conf(5)).
>
> In my opinion, that last sentence isn't quite strong enough - that, or
> there should be a FAQ on the ISC INN page about this issue.

Isn't clarifying the man page enough?

    Normally mailpost is run by sendmail(8) via an alias entry:

    local-mail-wreck-bikes: "|<pathbin in inn.conf>/mailpost
             -d local local.mail.rec.bicycles.racing"

I can add -b to the sample or write a sentence right after it saying
to use -b if mailpost does not have access to <pathtmp> (mentioning that
a temporary directory in the Postfix spool directory can be specified).


> That's great, but why doesn't mailpost give an error message?  The mailpost
> command was still succeeding - still returning 0 - and there wasn't any
> information being logged anywhere to indicate that the problem was that
> mailpost either couldn't find the pathtmp directory or couldn't write to it.

I do not know.  I will try to test that and fix it if I can.
By the way, the error should have been sent by mail to the news account.
Didn't you receive anything?


sub mailArtAndDie {
---->    print SENDMAIL <<"EOF" ;
             To: $Maintainer
             Subject: mailpost failure ($newsgroups): $msg
[...]
    exit (0) ;   # using a non-zero exit may cause problems.
}

I like the comment :)



if (!open TMPFILE,">$tmpfile") {
--->    syslog "err", "$msg\n" unless $debugging || -t STDERR ;
}

Nothing in syslog?



> Anyway, I'm glad I got it working - on to the next hurdle!

And thanks a lot for your feedback with mailpost!

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« -- D'ailleurs même les autres viandes ne peuvent être
  consommées que si elles sont cachères.
  -- Pas chères ! Dites, vous ne seriez pas un peu près
  de vos sesterces dans ce pays ? » (Astérix)