#212753 procmail: Poor error reporting.

Package:
procmail
Source:
procmail
Description:
Versatile e-mail processor
Submitter:
Glenn Maynard
Date:
2013-10-15 19:51:04 UTC
Severity:
wishlist
#212753#5
Date:
2003-09-25 19:46:29 UTC
From:
To:
In trying to filter the increasing amounts of virus spam I'm getting:

procmail: Locking "virus.lock"
procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER=virus"
procmail: Opening "virus"
procmail: Acquiring kernel-lock
procmail: Error while writing to "virus"
procmail: Truncated file to former size
procmail: Unlocking "virus.lock"

It's not reporting what the error is, so I can't tell what's wrong.
errno would be nice.

#212753#10
Date:
2003-09-27 23:26:53 UTC
From:
To:
reassign 212753 postfix
thanks

Well, I can tell you what's wrong even without looking at the Received
headers for your message: I'm 99% certain that you are using postfix
and you just told it somewhere you don't want mbox folders greater
than a given amount.

The fact that there was such a default sometime during the life of the
postfix package is a famous postfix bug, so I'm doing the usual
reassign.

I don't think procmail should be made more verbose because
of configuration bugs in other packages.

#212753#17
Date:
2003-09-27 23:47:40 UTC
From:
To:
reassign 212753 procmail
thanks

07:36pm glenn@zewt/2 [~] rm -f /etc/passwd
rm: Error removing `/etc/passwd'

Whether or not I'm supposed to be able to delete that file, that error
message is useless.  That's why it doesn't do that; like every other
sane tool, it says:

07:44pm glenn@zewt/2 [~] rm -f /etc/passwd
rm: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Permission denied

Likewise, procmail's error report is useless.

The error message:

procmail: Error while writing to "virus": file size limit exceeded

is not only simple to output, it'd save lots of people (as suggested
by your response) lots of time while diagnosing configuration errors
in other packages.

#212753#24
Date:
2005-07-07 16:19:25 UTC
From:
To:
Hello.

A long time ago I received this report from the Debian bug system.
I initially believed it was the typical error from postfix, but it was
not the case. Please read the additional explanations from the
submitter at:

http://bugs.debian.org/212753

Package: procmail
Version: 3.22-7
Severity: wishlist

In trying to filter the increasing amounts of virus spam I'm getting:

procmail: Locking "virus.lock"
procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER=virus"
procmail: Opening "virus"
procmail: Acquiring kernel-lock
procmail: Error while writing to "virus"
procmail: Truncated file to former size
procmail: Unlocking "virus.lock"

It's not reporting what the error is, so I can't tell what's wrong.
errno would be nice.

#212753#29
Date:
2013-10-15 19:40:57 UTC
From:
To:
The original reason the error reporting is not more verbose, is because
of the fact that it created one more system dependency on being able to
get at readable error messages from errno.

The days that procmail needed to compile cleanly on arkane systems are
long gone, and even if so, it's easy to pull up an old version these
days.  I'll see what I can do to augment the reporting with some more
errno information.