Package: aide Version: 0.18.3-1+deb12u2 Severity: normal Dear Maintainers,
since Debian Bookworm, aide refuses to send emails by default if s-nail is not installed. The documentation (README.Debian.gz in aide-common) falsely claims that /usr/lib/sendmail requires suid and that this affects bsd-mailx. Well, first of all, bsd-mailx doesn't even provide /usr/lib/sendmail, so this is misleading. In addition, there are (popular) MTAs that don't install /usr/lib/sendmail with the suid bit set, e.g. postfix. I have postfix configured to send out mail via a smarthost only, without any local mail delivery. I also disabled the smtpd daemon listening on port 25, so mail is sent via mailx/sendmail. And that works just fine with aide, even as non-root under systemd. I have set MAILCMD="/usr/bin/mailx" in /etc/default/aide in order to "convince" aide to send mail despite not having s-nail installed. The downside is that my custom MAILSUBJ is ignored now since Debian Bookworm. I would suggest to not hardcode a (soft) dependency on s-nail into the script. I think it would be better to merely warn people upon upgrading that sending mail may not work as non-root under systemd if the MTA requries suid and that s-nail might solve that. But don't add artificial restrictions or checks. If mail delivery breaks for some, then they know they need s-nail, but the rest can just keep using their known MTA setup. Kind regards, Timo
