mailscanner-newbie: mails are created funny

[Julian Field]

At 17:21 18/10/2002, you wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I've installed mailscanner 3.13.2-4 on Debian Woody 3.0 with
>sendmail 8.12.6-6. My virusengine is f-secure (fsav).
>
>I've got some problems getting it properly to work. First of all
>f-secure didn't want to start an told me something about problems
>with the code status. So I changed /usr/share/mailscanner/sweep.pl
>at the section "f-secure" from $S_Beta to $S_Supported. After that
>the mailscanner started.

Why didn't you just read the web page the error message referred you to,
and did what it told you to? You don't go editing the code, that's what the
mailscanner.conf file is for.

>Now I've got the output directory at /var/mail (owner root, group
>mail).

Why /var/mail and not /var/spool/mqueue like the docs tell you to?
/var/mail is where your user mailboxes probably are, and the last thing you
want is MailScanner putting its output in there.

>  I created the input directory /var/spool/mqueue.in and
>sendmail put its mails in there with the rights -rw-r----- (owner:
>root, group: smmsp). So I changed the mailscanner user to smmsp and
>the group also to smmsp.

No, just leave it commented the user and group commented out. It says this
in the comments for these 2 items:
# User to run as (not normally used for sendmail)
# Group to run as (not normally used for sendmail)

As you are using sendmail, they aren't supposed to be used.

>But now the created output mails (To: ddorf) in /var/mail/ have the
>rights and the funny filenames (created by sendmail in
>/var/spool/mqueue.in):

That's because you told MailScanner to put its output in the middle of your
mailboxes. It is sendmail's job to deliver mail from a queue into your
mailboxes, and it is very good at it. MailScanner does not get involved
with mail delivery at all.

>-rw-rw----1 ddorf       mail          0 Oct 18 15:31     ddorf
>-rw-r----- 1 root         smmsp   701 Oct 18 04:45 dfg9I2jQE8005980
>-rw-r----- 1 root         smmsp   365 Oct 18 16:08 dfg9IE024T012385
>-rw-r----- 1 root        smmsp  3980 Oct 18 16:02 dfg9IE224T012785
>-rw------- 1 smmsp    smmsp   1025 Oct 18 05:00 qfg9I2jQE8005980
>-rw------- 1 smmsp    smmsp    929 Oct 18 16:08 qfg9IE024T012385
>-rw------- 1 smmsp    smmsp    922 Oct 18 16:04 qfg9IE224T012785
>
>So the mails for user ddorf aren't associated to him and when I try
>to get the mails via pop3 none are downloaded.
>
>The mailscanner works fine, but I can't pop the mails anymore after
>adding the 2 startup lines to /usr/share/sendmail/sendmail Probably
>I have to change something within sendmail to tell it how to create
>received emails. But I don't know what.

(Apologies if I sound a bit abrupt, I've been trying to get V4 out the door
all afternoon and autoconf is behaving like a worthless piece of rubbish :-(
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ