procmail
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Re: Delivering to several users

1996-11-14 04:18:27
At Wed, 13 Nov 96 18:02:30 Stephane Bortzmeye wrote:

On Wednesday 13 November 96, at 11 h 0, the keyboard of 
Martin(_dot_)Wahlstrom(_at_)uab(_dot_)ericsson(_dot_)se (Martin Wahlstrom) 
wrote:

At our ISP we have our own domain.
All mail sent to anyone @our.domain goes into one
main account.

This is the most awful solution. A proper mail transport through UUCP or 
SMTP would be much simpler.

Yes. But my ISP do not support UUCP (yet...) ;(

This is how I use this:

- I use modem+PPP to connect every hour to "pop" our mail,
  and sendmail to send out mail.
- When "popped", disconnect and distribute to local users.

To fetch the mail I use popclient:
popclient -3 -s -u $POPUSER -p $POPPASS -o $TEMPMAIL $POPSERVER

popclient (at least version 2, version 3 seems better) should never be 
used. It doesn't test delivery before deleting the messages on the POP 
server. If your disk is full, you lose mail.

Aha! Didn't know that!
Quite important!

Any better programs anywhere?

cat $TEMPMAIL | /usr/local/bin/formail -I Status: -ds 
/usr/local/bin/procmail

At this step, you've lost the most important information: mail envelopes. 
procmail will do its best but cannot reconstruct them.

But what happens if someone sends a mail to "tore" AND "per" ?

Only the first one will get it. You can add a 'c' to every recipe, add a 
header (such as "formail -i"X-Delivered: true") each time a recipe 
matches and tests at the end if the mail was delivered at least once (and 
send it to postmaster if it wasn't).

Yes! Just realized that! 
( Thank You Alan K. Stebbens! )

Or isn't it?

What if your users subscribe to mailing lists? Their name will be in the 
envelope but will not appear in any header.

Yes. You are right about that!
But I'm lucky, my users are no "computer-people" ;)

I repeat myself: do not do it that way. procmail is great for filtering, 
auto-responding, etc, not as a poor substitute for proper mail 
configuration.

Yes I know... but as I said, my ISP do not support UUCP..

Well.. Is there a better solution?

        Martin/

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