Subject: pine.conf versus SuperUser

From: "Neil J Long, Dept of Materials" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1993 11:23:02 +0000

HI
Despite yesterdays humbling I have one minor problem with using imapd.
If I set-up a pine.conf entry so that all users get a default inbox on the main
server then root cannot use pine to read mail on same machine.
OK root can always use elm/mail but is this an inherent problem or local to
HP-UX?
We deleted the inbox-path entry and then root was ok - just to make sure that
pine built all its directories, etc., then re-inserted the inbox path and root
couldn't get access again. We have since edited all the users .pinerc's to
reflect the new inbox-path (not too bad as it is a new system) but is there a
way around this problem?
HP 700's, HP-UX 9.01, Pine 3.05. 
Neil

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From: [email-masked] (James Ralston Crawford)
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1993 14:36:52 -0500 (EST)

Neil J Long writes:
> If I set-up a pine.conf entry so that all users get a default inbox
> on the main server then root cannot use pine to read mail on same
> machine.

	Is there any reason you can't forward root's mail to a normal
user account and answer it there?  Also, that way you wouldn't need to
give someone the root password to allow them to read root's mail; just
dump their username in /.forward.

	Admittedly, this doesn't address the source of the problem,
but the rule of thumb that has always been handed down is to use
normal user accounts for as many things as possible, and the root
account only when absolutely necessary.

	Regards,

James

-- 
James Ralston Crawford \ Assistant Supervisor \ Advanced Technology Lab
[email-masked] \ [email-masked] \ [email-masked]
"Computer, you and I need to have a little talk."  - O'Brien, ST:DS9

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1993 12:37:14 -0800 (PST)

root (or any other user with user ID 0) can not use IMAP.  This is part of the
design of the IMAP server.  The reasons for this are long and involved, but
the one sentence summary is that there are good technical/security reasons
that you don't want to do this.

My recommendation is that you forward root mail to the individuals that are
responsible for answering mail directed to root.  You should never read mail
while logged in as root.

Regards,

-- Mark --