Ralph Freshour <rfresh(_at_)mail(_dot_)idt(_dot_)net> writes:
When incoming mail arrives on my server, I need to check a text file to
see if the incoming mail is addressed to a valid userr. I need to:
1. Parse the username out of the To: field.
For example, To: Joe Smith <joe(_at_)domain(_dot_)com>
I need to parse out "joe" because the
file of authorized users looks like this:
mary
henry
joe
bill
I need to find "joe" in that list file.
The authorized users file is called "users.list"
2. If "joe" is not found in the file, send to /dev/null
else contine to the next recipe.
a) Are the "authorized users" a subset of the user accounts (logins) on
the system? If not, forget procmail for now and start reading
up on sendmail, especially LUSER_RELAY.
b) You're not going to send a bounce message back to the original site
saying "sorry, so-and-so is not authorized to receive email"???
That's rude.
c) Why don't you just add to sendmail's ruleset 5 a lookup into a text
file database, such that if the user didn't have an entry it
returned a call to the error mailer? Something like (untested
code alert!):
R$+ $: < > $1
R< > $+ + $* $: < @ > < $( auth $1 $: <> $) > $1 + $2
R< > $+ $: < @ > < $( auth $1 $: <> $) > $1 look up user
R< @ > < <> > $* $#error $: NOPERM or whatever
R< @ > < $* > $* $: $2 They're okay
Then a suitable line defining the auth map and you're off and running.
As a general rule, I believe that if you're trying to reject and/or
redirect incoming email for multiple local or pseudo-local destination
addresses, then you should be using sendmail to do the work, not
procmail. As a Mail Delivery Agent, procmail does not have all the
information needed to do the above. Furthermore, it lacks the database
lookup machinery that makes the above efficient. Procmail may be
easier to understand then sendmail, but that doesn't mean it's right
for every task you can throw at it. To quote Archimedes, "Give me a
place to stand and I'll move the world." Sendmail is standing in that
place in the email universe, and procmail is not about to dethrone it.
If I seem to be repetitious in my hitting of this nail, that's because
I've watched people try to do virtual domains inside procmail (which is
only slightly different from what you describe above) for the last 4
years at least, and I have yet to head an unqualified success story.
People, including myself, have talked about getting sendmail to pass
the required info into procmail via a 'X-Envelope-Recipient:" header or
something similar, but I have never seen a working sendmail config
which did so. I even gave it a shot myself and found that I couldn't
get it to work. Now we have the "virtusertable" feature in the
sendmail m4 configs that does the entire thing in sendmail is 5 lines.
Philip Guenther