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Re: Procmailers beware: BCC handling

1996-11-14 02:10:41
On Wednesday 13 November 96, at 15 h 0, the keyboard of Mark Jared 
Nightingale <mark(_at_)aecinfo(_dot_)com> wrote:

Procmail is incapable of properly dealing with BCC's **if the sending mail
system has stripped the envelope** (which many do).  It appears that most
often such mail will fall through all the recipies to end up in the procmail
sysop's box.

??? I filter all my incoming mail through procmail. If every recipe 
fails, mail ends up in *my* mailbox. Unless you use procmail in a very 
strange way (such as a demultiplexer in the recent thread "Delivering to 
several users"), mail is yours and your procmail controls it.

The problem is simply that procmail is not a SMTP (or UUCP) server. It's 
a RFC822-mail filter. It only have RFC822 headers to take a decision. The 
whole point of Bcc is to hide something, so no wonder procmail is blind 
about Bcc.

Seems like a HUGE HOLE to me.  Makes me wonder how so many are operating
with procmail today. 

Because they use procmail properly, they don't try to use it to separate 
mail to different user accounts.

When more correspondents begin to use BCC for privacy
reasons, they're gonna get a BIG surprise when all those procmailers out
there put their private mail in someone else's box.

Absurd (see above). BTW, the mail can always be read by the sysadmin (or 
by sniffers). If you don't want it to be read, encrypt it.

Crypto mail software:

http://www.cs.hut.fi/crypto/software.html#email

Everything about crypto:

http://www.cs.hut.fi/crypto/

I'm working on getting MY ISP to leave the envelope and BCC info attached to
the message so that procmail can handle their mail correctly.  But that is
just one ISP.  The procmail experts on this list (to whom I owe much thanks,
appreciation, etc...) seem to be saying that we gotta live with it until all
the ISP's shape up.  That doesn't sit well with me, but what choice do we 
have?

It seems that you mix up a stupid mail setup at your ISP with the general 
rule. 


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