Another Mail.app question... this one concerning weird SendMail inconsistencies.

[rgoer]

I recently got a free DynDNS.org (http://www.dyndns.org) account, so I set up sendmail by follow Adriaan Tijsseling's excellent guide to nerding up OS X (http://www.kung-foo.tv/xtips.shtml), and have since installed the qpopper (http://www.eudora.com/qpopper/) pop3 server and set up a pop3 mail account in Mail.app which checks for mail coming to that new DynDNS address. This all works farkin great... most of the time. Once in a blue moon, however, I get a goofy error message when I try to either send or receive mail through my DynDNS account. It's always either something about an "SMTP error occurred when trying to contact host" or something about various directories not being group writeable (when I specifically remember setting all those directories as group-writable; Tijsseling's guide extensively goes over this). I was wondering, does anybody knew what was up with this?

[stetner]

It seems that when you do a software update from Apple that they like to leave the root directory permissions group writeable. Sendmail doesn't like it that way so it complains and won't run (probably because it opens up an obscure security hole). Simply

sudo chmod go-w /

or some have suggested

sudo chmod 755 /

but my / is

drwxr-xr-t 34 root admin 1112 Jan 25 00:19 /

so I just do the go-w which leaves the sticky bit on.

Cheers,
Doug

[rgoer]

Yeah, I knew about how a system update screws up almost all custom settings to certain low-level operations (which I think is kind of stupid, but maybe I just don't understand enough to see the wisdom in it)... however, I am finding myself having these problems seemingly at random. No system updates. Just out of the blue, sometimes, the permissions on those directories get fscked up.