On Sun, 1 Dec 2002, Nick Selby wrote:
Ah. Maybe I sent that off too quickly. The exact wording is:
The system-wide fetchmail daemon can be run either as root or as an unprivileged user 'fetchmail'. You should only run it as root if you will need to deliver mail directly from fetchmail to a MDA (unsafe, and not done by default in Debian), or if a plugin or preconnect line needs it.
Since I am using procmail, which I think is an MDA, this would make sense. But the question about why Debian thinks it's unsafe still remains. I guess I'm just trying to find out what risk I've accepted by doing it!
It only has to run as root if it should hand the mail to procmail itself without sendmail in between. Just set fetchmail to use sendmail or whatever MTA you are using, and your MTA can hand it to procmail. Then fetchmail does not need to be root. Regards Ole