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[Spencer Ogden <spencero AT mail.utexas.edu>]

I ran into this and had the same problem. Couldn't get xinetd to run exim 
with user mail.

Spencer

On Sunday 15 December 2002 02:21 am, Eric Sandall wrote:
> I also noticed this on my server, when I stopped getting mail and my g/f
> complained that she couldn't send anything.  So, looking into things
> (using mutt as my test program), I found that exim could no longer write
> to /var/spool/mail/log/*, even though everything there was mail.mail
> 660. So, I checked /etc/xinetd.d/exim, and 'lo and behold, exim is now
> running as user/group 'exim' instead of user/group 'mail'.  I tried
> changing the user/group back to 'mail' and restarting exim, but exim
> wouldn't hear of it, kept running as 'exim' anyways.  So I put it back
> to user/group 'exim' and changed the permissions on /var/spool/mail* to
> use 'exim' as group on everything, then changed all 'mail' ownership to
> 'exim', and voila!
>
> In short, I have my SMTP working again.  :)
>
> Question:  Why was this changed?  exim should be run as 'mail', since
> that's the default permissions, just like my webroot is
> www-data.www-data, not 'apache', so if I want to run another web server
> (thttpd, or some such), I just run it as www-data.  Same with 'ftp',
> etc.
>
> -One of Four
> a.k.a. sandalle