I am running postfix, and it seems it is willing to accept emails for system users, such as man, sshd, daemon, www-data, ...
Is desirable (probably not)? and what I can do to disable this?
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Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Martin Vegter
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how else would www-data get it's cron mail? – jordanm Dec 12 '13 at 15:27
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why should www-data receive any mail at all? – Martin Vegter Dec 12 '13 at 15:31
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typically you would set it up as an alias for another user or account such as root. – jordanm Dec 12 '13 at 15:48
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why would I set up `www-data` as alias for root? – Martin Vegter Dec 12 '13 at 16:16
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Any user can potentially run cron jobs. The man user might purge the catman cache. The bin user might do library and package management. The www-data user might purge caches. If any of these cron jobs give output (often to indicate a problem) it is nice to let someone know, and cron does this by default by mailing the running user.
Now the simple thing to do is to alias all these users to root and alias root to a real user who is responsible for dealing with all this (martin). Simple, effective, and does not require things like maintaining multiple user databases (email users, login users, psudo users) and the complicated configuration that requires.
hildred
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