problem forwarding to program

[Brian Whittaker {CV-AEC Penn St x304}]

In v6n227 (long, long ago):

> Remember that a program such as vacation that is started by sendmail
> will run as the user who sent the mail if that user is local, otherwise it
> will run as "daemon".  Perhaps the permissions on the recipient's home
> directory are too restrictive?  --wnl

This appears to be only true in the case where the redirection to a
program is by an alias.  If it's specified by a .forward file then the
program runs with the user and group ids of the original recipient (the
owner of the .forward file) - at least it does on our 3.2 and 3.5 systems.
[[ This has not been my experience.  Perhaps it depends on sendmail's
configuration.  --wnl ]]

The original problem with "vacation" might *just* be because of missing
out the vital step of running "vacation -I" - I've seen several normally
sophisticated users tripped up by that.

	Brian

[[ What I (and others) have been tripped up by is not setting the
permissions on the database files to world write.  Vacation was run as
someone besides the owner of the .forward and root.  So the vacation
message would get sent out but the original sender's address was not
recorded in the database.  --wnl ]]