Why would the sticky bit NOT be set on /var/spool/mail ???

[Derek Broughton]

Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
> 
> I did nothing to change anything about my local inbox folder accept
> mailing myself a couple of test messages... However I've noticed that
> when I start pine it puts the following warning on it's status line for
> a few seconds.
> 
> [Folder vulnerable - directory /var/spool/mail must have 1777 protection]
> 
> I wasn't sure what it was talking about, but on a guess perhaps octal mode
> values for chmod...
> 
> a quick look at the man page for chmod indicated that a 1 in the
> leftmost position of the 4 octal digits was the "sticky bit" and that on
> world writable directories, it was used to prevent others besides the
> owner of a file and/or root from doing nasty things like deleting or
> renaming the file... Hmmmnnn Better have a look see.
... 
> Extracted from "ls -l /var" :
> 
> drwxrwsr-x   2 root mail  4096 Jan  5 22:57 mail
> 
> Since I'm not so good at interpreting the finer points of the symbolic
> representation of permissions I checked via mc and sure enough it didn't
> have the sticky bit set...
> 
... 
> My question is why wouldn't this sticky bit have been set by default on
> kubuntu????

I'm not sure I can help, but I think pine's out to lunch on that message.

If the owner is root.mail (mine has the same permissions/ownership), then
how can "you" alter anything in there?  If you have world _write_
permission, then you probably need the sticky bit.
-- 
derek