[Mimedefang] strange sendmail error : SYSERR(defang): can not chdir(/var/spool/clientmqueue/): Permission denied

[Scott.Larnach at ed.ac.uk]

On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Stephane Lentz wrote:

> on some test machine running MIMEDefang 2.23 that I'm preparing to
> upgrade to 2.26  I'm seing some strange sendmail errors related to
>  the defang account:
>
> Nov 20 11:58:31 mailgate sendmail[15033]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(defang): can not chdir(/var/spool/clientmqueue/): Permission denied

Sendmail (8.12.6) wants to be setgid to the same group as owns
/var/spool/clientmqueue:

-r-xr-sr-x   1 root     smmsp     718428 Oct 22 17:17 /usr/lib/sendmail
drwxrwx---   2 smmsp    smmsp        512 Nov 20 12:21 /var/spool/clientmqueue/

so that an unprivileged user can submit mail to the client mail queue.

I assume your filter is generating mail in some circumstances. This will
be as user "defang" so sendmail needs the setgid to write the spool.

Scott Larnach, Edinburgh University