"Philip" == Philip Guenther <guenther(_at_)gac(_dot_)edu> writes:
Philip> 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.
Philip> You need to use perl in your .procmailrc? [...]
Sorry, I think I was very confused when I wrote the above. I
don't need Perl in my .procmailrc, but I still can't get the
.forward to work. My problem is the following:
I can ftp to the mail delivery machine (and hence change
.forward), but I when I try to login I get logged out immediately.
I suppose that means I don't have a Unix shell there to run
procmail in, which is why the .forward mechanism doesn't work.
Is this correct? Is there anyway around this? (In my naive
thinking, sendmail must be running in some shell, so can't that be
made to run procmail somehow?).
>> Is there any way I can get sendmail to return an error
>> code or do I have to send a message back?
Philip> You have to send the message back. Mail delivery on
Philip> the Internet is done via a series of transactions in
Philip> which each successive agent, once it has accepted
Philip> responsibility for a message from its predecessor,
Philip> *must* either find another agent which will accept
Philip> responsibility, or send back a bounce message. Once
Philip> another agent has accepted said responsibility, the
Philip> previous one is freed of it. Thus, once sendmail
Philip> delivers the message to the delivery agent which
Philip> accepts it on your behalf with a successful return
Philip> code, _you_, or something running on your behalf, has
Philip> to generate the "bounce" message: sendmail is done
Philip> with it.
First time I have this explained to me explicitly and so
concisely - thank you!
Sacha
Alexander V. (Sacha) Sardo Infirri Tel/Fax:+81-75-753-7214/7272
RIMS, Kyoto University, Kitashirakawa, Sakyou-ku, Kyoto 606-01, Japan.
http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~sacha/ or finger for PGP Key
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