OpenMacNews wrote: > i'd tried setting an alternative directory for any given user i was exec'ing > at > with the -H option ... to no avail. same complaint :-S
I looked at the source code in spamd. I had not read the man page documentation on -H carefully enough. It is used to set the $HOME variable used by external helper apps like razor and pyzor, but is not used for anything else. If you specify a --username, then that user must have a home directory, independent of the -H option. I think the reason for requiring it is that there may be places, specifically plugins, in SpamAssassin that assume that there is a home directory, such as the autowhitelist mutex code that you encountered. Looking for what uses the home directory, I found several plugins, specifically autowhitelist, bayes, and hashcash, make use of files that by default are in ~/.spamassassin/. They each have a configuration option that you can set to make the directory explicit, but they default to being under the user's home. In any case, spamd is written to check that a home directory does exist if --username is set to something. So you really do need to create a directory for the maildaemon user and then everything should work ok. As far as I can tell doing that will make the -H option unnecessary. -- sidney
