php mail() function not working

[Fraser Campbell]

On Monday 06 October 2003 19:31, Keith Mastin wrote:

> As it turned out, it had nothing to do with the code. Postfix-2.0.15
> wasn't accepting mail from apache, failing with a permission error to
> write to the postdrop directory. We mucked around with it for a while, and
> finally came to the conclusion that the only way for this to work now is
> to add the user apache to the postfix and postdrop groups. I'm still
> unsure of all the security implications here, but I'm sure there will be
> something.

There's no way that apache should be a member of the postdrop group.  The 
implication is that apache can write directly to the maildrop directory.  A 
malicious apache process (CGI or whatever) could dump bogus data into the 
postdrop directory possibly screwing up legitimate email delivery, if it 
isn't a shared server then the risk is pretty small.  Postfix tries to be 
smart about security, using multiple processes for each step in delivery, one 
process not trusting the other so I doubt that the security implications are 
more serious than a DoS.

If you read the postfix anatomy documents 
(http://www.postfix.org/receiving.html) you'll see that /usr/sbin/sendmail 
invokes postdrop to deliver mail into the maildrop directory.  I suspect that 
the permissions on your postdrop program are incorrect, they look like this 
on Debian:

-r-xr-sr-x    1 root     postdrop     7564 Jul 28 18:58 /usr/sbin/postdrop

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Halton Hills, Ontario, Canada                       Debian GNU/Linux

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