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Re: Procmailers beware: BCC handling

1996-11-14 12:28:39
Mark Jared Nightingale <mark(_at_)aecinfo(_dot_)com> writes:
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.

No, the very nature of SMTP means that email can arrive with absolutely
no way of determining what address the original sender used that caused
the email to be delivered to your mailbox.  This can easily happen right
now when someone Bcc's a mailing list.  I'm Bcc'ing this message to both
you and list.  You'll get two copies which will differ in their envelope
_senders_, *not* their envelope recipients.  The envelope recipient will
be your address, even for the copy that goes through the list.  This you
cannot change.


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

a) Bcc's are really rare.  In over 5 years of being a system
        administrator I've bcc'ed thing less than a dozen times, and
        most of those have been for demonstrative purposes, like this
        message.

b) I find that I do all my sorting on where the came _from_.  Since
        mailing lists rewrite the envelope sender (now days), I just
        sort on that (as it appears in the Return-Path: header).  This
        means that if someone sends a message to both me and, say, the
        procmail list, I'll get one copy in my inbox (the one that went
        directly to me), and one copy in my procmail mailbox (the one
        that I received from the list).  If someone Bcc's the list,
        it'll still end up in the procmail mailbox because I ignore the
        To and Cc headers.  It doesn't matter to me that there's
        nothing in them.


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.

I see no connection between Bcc's and privacy.  What is the Bcc action
making private?

Your comment about "put their private mail in someone else's box" makes
it sound like you're using procmail to do something like virtual domain
processing, where mail for multiple people is fed into one 'address',
wherein procmail is used to then split it back up.  This is obsolete in
the face of sendmail 8.8's 'virtusertable' feature, and should be
avoided because YOU'RE USING THE WRONG TOOL FOR THE JOB.  If it works
some of the time you should be happy, but it *cannot* work all of the
time without a major assist from the Mail Transfer Agent, and at that
point you might as well move it all there and be done with it.  It's
more efficient, and heh, it actually works.  What a combo.


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?

This solves the virtual user problem, but it doesn't solve the problem of
sorting on 'how it got to me'.  However, since this latter problem is
solvable, you're going to have to be happy with it.

Philip Guenther

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