[tpop3d-discuss] Unable to open mailbox; it may be locked by another concurrent session

[Paul Makepeace]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 06:23:50PM +0200, Leon Botes wrote:
> -rw-------   1 mailnull  mail   403 Feb 25 18:23 leon

Here exim is delivering mail as mailnull:mail and so I'm guessing in
your exim.conf you have in the Directors section something like,

local_delivery:
  driver = appendfile
  file = /var/mail/${local_part}
  group = mail
  user = mailnull

But tpop3d is attempting to read the mail as the user that's just logged
in. You have to have one or the other - exim delivers as the user's id,
or it delivers as a particular fixed ID, e.g. mailnull as you have it.

The disadvantage of the doing it with one fixed ID is that if you have
shell users on the system they'll be able to read each other's mail as
their mailspools are all the same owner.

If there are no shells, i.e. virtual mail users then this is fine.

If you have shell accounts then,
    comment out or remove the user = and group = lines in exim.

If you don't have shell accounts then,
    make sure tpop3d is reading as a set user/group - look at auth-pam-mail-group.

(I noticed there is no auth-pam-mail-user directive, just
auth-pam-mail-group - so you would have to make mail group readable: add
mode = 0660 to your local delivery Director above.)

I hope this makes some sense,
Paul

-- 
Paul Makepeace ....................................... http://paulm.com/

"If the cow asks a question, then you could state the day."
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/