procmail
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Re: I need procmail to "bounce" a message to the sender

1996-05-28 07:42:32
Sacha Sardo Infirri <sacha(_at_)kurims(_dot_)kyoto-u(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp> writes:
I run procmail as a cron job every minute because the machine
which receives my mail does not have Perl installed, but I can
access the spool from another machine which does have Perl.

You need to use perl in your .procmailrc?  Hmm, the conveniance of
having procmail do the delivery to begin with (via a .forward, for instance)
is such that if given the choice between procmail delivery without
perl and procmail running from cron with perl, I'd take the former
and figure out how to do what I needed with sed/awk/tr/etc.


Is there any way I can get sendmail to return an error code or do
I have to send a message back?

You have to send the message back.  Mail delivery on the Internet is
done via a series of transactions in which each successive agent, once
it has accepted responsibility for a message from its predecessor,
*must* either find another agent which will accept responsibility, or
send back a bounce message.  Once another agent has accepted said
responsibility, the previous one is freed of it.  Thus, once sendmail
delivers the message to the delivery agent which accepts it on your
behalf with a successful return code, _you_, or something running on
your behalf, has to generate the "bounce" message: sendmail is done
with it.

Philip Guenther