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[sieve] Possible abuse of variables with vacation extension.

2009-08-24 11:30:15
Hello,

I've been getting frustrated e-mails from users having lots of aliases for their mail account. They currently need to specify all these in the :addresses list of the vacation action. One of the solutions I proposed is querying the available (single-drop) aliases in the background, requiring the implementation of a background alias lookup. Thus far, I haven't gotten around to implementing this.

Today, however, I got an e-mail about an alternative 'solution' that works out of the box, but somehow it doesn't feel right. The proposed solution is the following:

require ["variables", "envelope", "vacation"];

if envelope :matches "to" "*" {
  set "envto" "${1}";
  vacation
  :addresses ["${envto}"]
  "vacation message here...";
}

This effectively circumvents the implicit delivery detection of the vacation action (RFC 5230 - section 4.5), with all the possible consequences. This is similar to the non-standard ' :addresses "*" ' proposal I got some time earlier.

The above raises the question whether it is a good idea to allow variable substitutions in the :addresses argument of the vacation action. I presume the :addresses argument is there for a good reason.

One of the nasty scenarios I can imagine is when recipients of a multi-drop alias (an ad-hoc mailing list) use this solution. An unfortunate sender could receive lots of redundant vacation replies if the list members are collectively on vacation.

Regards,

Stephan.




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