Delivery of e-mail to the superuser's account [was: Re: [plug] fetchmail]

[Onno Benschop]

On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 19:14, James Devenish wrote:
> In message <1081327142.2404.212.camel at latte.internal.itmaze.com.au>
> on Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 06:39:03PM +1000, Onno Benschop wrote:
> > The only comment I'd have is that you're delivering mail to root - bad!
> 
> Are there any references for this?

Well, I got it from the exim config, but the problem is two-fold as far
as I can see...

Firstly, the root home directory in which the mailbox exists is likely
to be in the root partition. So sending a big message to root can fill
up your root partition and bad things happen - of course I am assuming a
lot of defaults here...

The second problem is that of retrieval of the mail. Most users will POP
their mail, so if you were to do this as a root user, your root password
would go across the wire in clear-text.

Now I'm no expert, but those two things are enough for me to put sending
mail to root under the heading "bad" ;-)


Onno Benschop 

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