Delivery problems with dmail

I have recently started to see delivery problems with dmail that get
distributed with uw-imap utils. I use fetchmail, procmail and dmail in
that order to deliver my mails to a specified folder in the user
directory. I have the following in the procmail recipe.

dmail +Pine/Mail/Imap1

As far as I understand 'dmail' is supposed to change the '+' with the
$HOME variable and mail gets delivered correctly. Atleast it used to:

dmail /home/vic/Pine/Mail/Imap1

But recently (after I changed my distro), dmail is trying to deliver to
$HOME/Mail . Note the space after Mail. Here the relevant log output:

Nov 1 11:18:04 localhost dmail[2696]: delivering to
vic+Pine/Mail/Imap1
Nov 1 11:18:04 localhost dmail[2696]: Verifying safe delivery to
/home/vic/Mail /Pine/Mail/Imap1
Nov 1 11:18:04 localhost dmail[2696]: delivery to /home/vic/Mail
/Pine/Mail/Imap1 unsafe: No such file or directory
Nov 1 11:18:04 localhost dmail[2696]: invalid mailbox name
vic+Pine/Mail/Imap1
Nov 1 11:18:04 localhost dmail[2696]: retrying delivery to INBOX
Nov 1 11:18:04 localhost dmail[2696]: Verifying safe delivery to
/home/vic/Mail /INBOX
Nov 1 11:18:04 localhost dmail[2696]: mbx appending to
#driver.mbx/INBOX (file /home/vic/Mail /INBOX)
Nov 1 11:18:04 localhost dmail[2696]: delivered to /home/vic/Mail
/INBOX
Nov 1 11:18:04 localhost dmail[2696]: Verifying safe delivery to
/home/vic/Mail /INBOX


Why does + gets replaced with '/home/vic/Mail ' instead of '/home/vic' ?
Any help is appreciated.


Vick.

Re: Delivery problems with dmail

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Vicker wrote:
> But recently (after I changed my distro), dmail is trying to deliver to
> $HOME/Mail . Note the space after Mail.

Unfortunately, the best answer that I can offer you is "try the unmodified
distribution directly from UW instead of a third-party redistribution, and
see if that makes the problem go away."

Many problems seem to be caused by modifications made by third-parties.
From your description, it looks like your third-party distribution has a
well-intentioned but misguided modification to force all mail to be in a
"Mail" subdirectory of the home directory, and that the space is a bug.

Needless to say, even without the space bug, this modification is
inappropriate for you since you are using names under the home directory.

Thus, probably the best thing for you is *not* to use third-party
distributions, but instead use the unmodified distribution directly from
UW.

IMAP toolkit: (c-client library, ipop[23]d, imapd, dmail, tmail, mailutil)
ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/imap.tar.Z

Pine: (includes Pico, Pilot, and IMAP toolkit)
ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/
http://www.washington.edu/pine/getpine

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

Re: Delivery problems with dmail

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 Mark Crispin wrote:

> On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Vicker wrote:
>> But recently (after I changed my distro), dmail is trying to deliver
>> to $HOME/Mail . Note the space after Mail.
>
> Unfortunately, the best answer that I can offer you is "try the
> unmodified distribution directly from UW instead of a third-party
> redistribution, and see if that makes the problem go away."

Actually I did try this with the 'dmail' that came with Pine 4.55, with
same results.

I also tried now with 'imap.tar.Z' with same results.

When I mean I tried, I compiled the entire source and just took the
'dmail' binary and copied to the /usr/bin and redid the fetchmail
exercise.


> Many problems seem to be caused by modifications made by
> third-parties. From your description, it looks like your third-party
> distribution has a well-intentioned but misguided modification to
> force all mail to be in a "Mail" subdirectory of the home directory,
> and that the space is a bug.

Looks to me the "space" is introduced because there's already a
$HOME/Mail present.

Could there be any ENV variable I need to adjust?

Vick.

Re: Delivery problems with dmail

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Vicker wrote:
> Actually I did try this with the 'dmail' that came with Pine 4.55, with same
> results.
> I also tried now with 'imap.tar.Z' with same results.
> When I mean I tried, I compiled the entire source and just took the 'dmail'
> binary and copied to the /usr/bin and redid the fetchmail exercise.

Are you certain that the dmail binary that you think you are running is,
in fact, the dmail binary that procmail is running? Many strange "it did
not get fixed" problems happened because a different binary was accessed
than the user choose.

For what it's worth, the current version of Pine is 4.64.

> Looks to me the "space" is introduced because there's already a $HOME/Mail
> present.
> Could there be any ENV variable I need to adjust?

The only enviroment variable that is referenced is $HOME, which probably
won't be set by dmail's call from procmail. However, you may want to
check to see if something external (perhaps in procmail?) is setting $HOME
to be your UNIX home directory appended with "/Mail ".

Also, check to see if there is an /etc/c-client.cf file. If there is,
what happens if you remove it (probably you should rename it to some other
name in case you need it)? If you don't recall putting it there, then you
might well be the victim of your distribution trying to "help" you.

If none of these help, let me know and I'll give you some other things to
try.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Re: Delivery problems with dmail

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 Mark Crispin wrote:

> Also, check to see if there is an /etc/c-client.cf file. If there is,
> what happens if you remove it (probably you should rename it to some
> other name in case you need it)?

That's IT. It had the following:

[root@localhost ~]# cat /etc/c-client.cf.org
I accept the risk of using UW-IMAP
set mail-subdirectory Mail

And there was indeed a space after Mail. Gotcha!!

> If you don't recall putting it there, then you might well be the
> victim of your distribution trying to "help" you.

Yep, you couldn't be more right about it.

I wanted to do a search for "Mail" in /etc/ in the back of my mind.
Somehow forgot about it along the way.

Thanks a lot!

Vick.

Re: Delivery problems with dmail

Perhaps you ought to send a bug report to the vendor of that distribution
thanking them for their professionalism in breaking your software.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.