this is my first posting to this list so please excuse me if i leave anything out.

i have a debian potato server on which i have installed maildrop to run a script which will strip html out of email. the mta is exim 3.12-10.1.

i created a new user called testuser to test things. in this user's home directory i created a forward file containing this line:

"|/usr/bin/maildrop"

permissions on this file are set to 0600.

i then created a file called .mailfilter in the home directory with the following:

DEMIMEFILTER="/usr/local/bin/demime -"

if (/^Content-Type:.*html/ || \ /^Content-Type:.*rtf/ || \ /^Content-Type:.*multipart/) { xfilter $DEMIMEFILTER }

permissions on this file are set to 0644.

i sent mail to testuser from one of the workstations on the LAN. the mail bounces with the following error:

------ |/usr/bin/maildrop ------

usr/bin/maildrop: Unable to create a dot-lock.

---------------------------------------------

Maildrop version is 0.75-2.1.

The permissions on the maildrop files are as under:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 23576 Aug 12 2000 dotlock -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4312 Aug 12 2000 maildirmake -rwxr-sr-x 1 root mail 139448 Aug 12 2000 maildrop -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36376 Aug 12 2000 reformail -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 31228 Aug 12 2000 reformime

Could someone please give me a pointer as to what is going wrong?

Thanks, Sam