sh, .forward, and procmail

[Steve Hanov]

I just installed Red Hat Linux 6.0 over Red Hat 5.1 (after it sat for a
year). I am on a standalone computer with a modem connection to the
internet. I use fetchmail to retrieve my mail.

I'm trying to set up mail filtering using procmail. I've read the mail
filtering FAQ by Nancy, but nothing is working. The problem seems to be
my ".forward" file. I've tried several variations on the line:

"|exec /usr/bin/procmail #smhanov"

but my test mails bounces to root.

The bounced message have the subject, "Postmaster notify: Service
Unavailable" and, amoung other things, say:

sh: exec not available for sendmail programs.
544 "|exec /usr/bin/procmail #smhanov" ... Service unavailable.

I am new to Linux/Unix. What does this mean, and how do I fix it?

[Steve Hanov]

Never mind. After some time with www.dejanews.com, I found the answer:

"change the Mprog line at the end of sendmail.cf to be /bin/sh instead of
/usr/sbin/smrsh"

Hopefully, this helps somebody else out.

[Philip Guenther]

Steve Hanov <smh...@uwaterloo.ca> writes:

> Never mind. After some time with www.dejanews.com, I found the answer:
>
> "change the Mprog line at the end of sendmail.cf to be /bin/sh instead of
> /usr/sbin/smrsh"

...

> > I'm trying to set up mail filtering using procmail. I've read the mail
> > filtering FAQ by Nancy, but nothing is working. The problem seems to be
> > my ".forward" file. I've tried several variations on the line:
> >
> > "|exec /usr/bin/procmail #smhanov"
> >
> > but my test mails bounces to root.
> >
> > The bounced message have the subject, "Postmaster notify: Service
> > Unavailable" and, amoung other things, say:
> >
> > sh: exec not available for sendmail programs.
> > 544 "|exec /usr/bin/procmail #smhanov" ... Service unavailable.

Ick! The prog mailer specifies smrsh instead of sh for a reason.
Rather than work around it, why don't you work with it? Put your
sendmail.cf back the way it was, place a link to the procmail binary in
/etc/smrsh, and restart sendmail.

Philip Guenther

----------------------------------------------------------------------
guen...@gac.edu UNIX Systems and Network Administrator
Gustavus Adolphus College St. Peter, MN 56082-1498
Source code never lies: it just misleads (Programming by Purloined Letter?)