Re: question on "-u defaultuser" parameter:

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Oct 13), Cassandra Lynette Brockett said:
> Pat Masterson said:
> > Is "defaultuser" a required string? Or am I suppoded to substitute
> > a real user name like "nobody" here?
> 
> In my case I have a user "multi" in the SpamAssassin preferences
> database and every time I get in a multi-recipient email it gets
> handled using the preferences for that user.  If you don't run from a
> database, nobody is not a bad choice.  The user you choose should
> exist somewhere that SA can use somehow, otherwise SA will default to
> the root user (which may or may not be a bad idea).
> 
> From what I can tell the option is included in the milter as quite
> often the user a piece of spam is "addressed" to is not always the
> user(s) it is being delivered to, and as such relying on just the -u
> option from spamc means you would quite often get an invalid user for
> spam - hence the option to set a default user for the SpamAssassin
> process.

spamass-milter uses the envelope recipient, which is always accurate. 
The only time the 'defaultuser' string is used if if there are multiple
local recipients for a message (a mailinglist that two people have
subscribed to, or a spam that stacks 100 recipients onto one message).

So the -u flag has two functions: 1) it enables username parsing that
it sends to spamc with the -u, and 2) when there are multiple local
recipients, it provides a fallback username.

-- 
        Dan Nelson
        address@hidden