I have searched the archives, and think I have an idea regarding my problem, but I may be off. Using Postifx/Courier IMAP/Maildrop as MDA. Also using Anomy Sanitizer/Spamassassin. Incoming mail runs through a user who calls Anomy and Spamassassin, then hands off to maildrop for local delivery. My users, mostly of them squirrelmail have system accounts with shadow passwords, but no valid login shell, i.e., /sbin/nologin.

It seems when I try to run mailbot to send an autoreply with a .mailfilter file, it just queues the mail. Eventually postifx delivers a bounce saying "/usr/local/bin/maildrop". Command output: This account is currently not available." By account, it is referring to the intended recpipient. Running maildrop manually works. So I know my mailfilter syntax is okay. If I remove the .mailfilter file, mail delivery resumes normally.

I found this posting in the archive:

Andy Bradford writes: It appears that maildrop requires that a user have a valid shell in > /etc/passwd to be able to send out autoreplies using the mailbot command > (and possibly any other command run from .mailfilter), is this correct?

Sam replied: Anything that runs an external command (xfilter, backticks) runs $SHELL to invoke the command, and $SHELL is initialized from the password file.

My questions: *How is the maildrop daemon run, with what privileges or as what user? *When executing the cc command to copy the mail, does maildrop pass this another user? Perhaps it runs in the context of the intended mail recipient, in this case, a local user?

If I missed something obvious here, my apologies. Also, thanks to Sam for the hard work.

Regards, Scott