On 27 Jun 1997, Paul Vincent Craven wrote:
On 6/27/97, Tim Showalter wrote:
I'd like to see a "redirect" command added to the basic actions list.
What does redirect do?
Forwarding mail usually changes the "from:" from the original sender to the
person who is forwarding the mail. Redirect leaves the line alone. So a user
receiving redirected mail will see the mail as coming from the original
sender, not
the person who redirected it. A user receiving forwarded mail will always
have the
"from" field show the individual who redirected it. Some mail systems also
prepend a ">" to each line of a forwarded message, but not redirect mail.
Forward is defined (or will be, in the draft) to do just this, that is, what
a .forward file does. Is the other behavior useful in this case?
Some method where the extension action can reference the text of the
message.
This would allow an extension action to file a message in a database for
example.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Are you looking for a way to deal with
the insides of a message?
No, just pass the entire message (or a reference to it) to an external action
command. This would greatly enhance what extension-actions are capable of
doing.
I usually think of extension actions as being some type of plug-in
architecture.
I don't see them that way. This is a very dumb scripting language. The
message just is, and I don't see any reason it needs to be passed around.
I'd also like to see some discussion of rules on outgoing mail...
I think this is out of scope of what I'd intended. I also belive delayed
mail is best done with a cron job. Can you be more specific?
I would not want to tell a novice user how to delay mail using a cron job! My
thought was that a client could add a line to the message such as:
x-delay-mail: blah blah
And the SMTP server would not forward the mail until the specified time was
reached. Outgoing rules could also allow a company could forward a copy all
messages that employees send to the competitor's domain to the office
manager, etc.
This is seperate from filtering. I also don't believe SMTP is the right
place to implement such a delay. If a novice user really needs delayed
email, it can be implemented with suitable use of the sleep system call on a
reasonable system in something far more user-friendly than cron or at.
--
Tim Showalter
tjs(_at_)andrew(_dot_)cmu(_dot_)edu