Thanks everyone for your comments. We discovered that the parent directory of the home directories were unsafe. So, it was a bit of sendmail's error message not being descriptive enough (implying that it was the user's home directory as opposed to any directory in the tree). We had mounted some space from another unix box and saw that sendmail behaved, so that why we thought it was filer related. When we migrated the users over to the filer, we must have started with bad perms on the parent directory. -----Original Message----- From: Surlow, Jim [mailto:surlow@lucent.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2002 5:19 PM To: 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: Sendmail .forward & filer home directories - "unsafe/world-writea ble"!?

Filer Admins,

We have unix home directories on our filer. We just noticed today that sendmail reports that the .forward files are in a "World writable directory" and that the user directory is "unsafe directory path, marked unsafe". (These are sendmail errors - I'm at LogLevel=99 for sendmail).

Then the mail is delivered locally to the box as opposed to forwarded.

Now, my directories are not world writeable! So, I'm wondering what permissions aren't being read correctly. I can fix sendmail by changing the sendmail.cf to include "DontBlameSendmail=forwardfileinunsafedirpath", but am interested in the underlying issues here.

We are running different versions of sendmail. The host that I've been testing on is running 8.11.6

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jim Surlow Billing & Customer Care Lucent Technologies