A few sendmail permissions problems

[davidst]

I originally installed sendmail from a Debian package with the user as
smmta, but I recompiled from source with the user set to smmsp (I
think, is there a way to verify this?). That could be the source of
all the problems below.

Sendmail is running and things seemed to be working fine (mail can be
sent, received and read by various mail clients), but I finally
noticed two errors: CRON was sending an emial to root every 20 minutes
complaining about how it couldn't create a folder /var/run/sendmail

I created that folder myself with the root account and ownership by
smmsp and those messages stopped, but I don't know if that really
helped or just hid a problem. I'm not sure what that folder is used
for.

Meanwhile, I tried pop3 access and that doesn't work giving me the
following error:

There was a problem logging onto your mail server. Your Password was
rejected. Account: 'mymail', Server: 'newserver.mydomain.com',
Protocol: POP3, Server Response: '-ERR [SYS/TEMP] Failed to create /
var/spool/pop/.davidst.pop with uid 1000, gid 0. Change
permissions.', Port: 110, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 0x800CCC90,
Error Number: 0x800CCC92

Right now there is /var/spool/pop folder with permission and owner
drwxrwsr-x root:mail

So in short, I'm wondering how to verify the user ID of my sendmail
executable, what the /var/run/sendmail directory is used for and why
the pop3 access isn't working? Does pop3 even have anything to do
with sendmail or is that handled by a different program?

Thanks

[ska]

davidst wrote:
> I originally installed sendmail from a Debian package with the user as
> smmta, but I recompiled from source with the user set to smmsp (I
> think, is there a way to verify this?). That could be the source of
> all the problems below.
>
> Sendmail is running and things seemed to be working fine (mail can be
> sent, received and read by various mail clients), but I finally
> noticed two errors: CRON was sending an emial to root every 20 minutes
> complaining about how it couldn't create a folder /var/run/sendmail

This is a cron script from Debian, if you do not use the Debian
sendmail package, you should uninstall the package.

> Meanwhile, I tried pop3 access and that doesn't work giving me the
> following error:

This is a problem with your POP3 server, but has nothing to do with
sendmail.

-ska

[davidst]

Ah, I see. I really need to learn more about the CRON system.

And the pop3 server is different from sendmail... I should have known
that.

Thanks