procmail
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Need to deliver mail to 2 different spool areas

1997-02-12 11:44:16
I would like to spool mail to 2 different directories in order to
keep a backup of spooled mail to disk until the next tape backup 
runs to prevent loss of mail due to disk errors and such.....

1- the regular /var/spool/mail or in the users home-dir.
2- /var/spool/alt-mail (probably an NFS mounted partition from the
   host that will keep the 'backed-up' mail)..

My thoughts are to put 'something' between sendmail and the local 
delivery agent (procmail in our case) that splits the stream and
sends it to each....  However, I am concerned with how to feed
the message and args into 2 different delivery agent programs because
of the way sendmail forks and execs....and I am no C programmer.  
Also, maintenance of this seems a little high... ???

A quick a dirty solution, I think, is to create OURprocmail and put
it on the local delivery agent line in the sendmail.cf file:

Mlocal P=/usr/local/bin/OURprocmail .....

Then have a .procmailrc for OURprocmail that does the following:

        :0:c
        *
        |/usr/local/bin/procmail

        :0:
        *
        |/usr/local/bin/deliver-to-alt-spool  (this could be yet another
                       'procmail' prog that points to /var/spool/alt-mail).

Is there a better, more efficient way of doing this??  Also, will
all errors be reported back to sendmail??  The only ones I can think
of would be 'wrong permissions on mail spool', 'locks', 'disk fills up'.

HELP!!  I figure there has to be people out there doing this and keeping
it simple at the same time.  Thanks for your help!!!


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pamela(_at_)infi(_dot_)net                                Pamela J. Skillman
http://www.usgcc.odu.edu                       Systems Engineer III
                                               Systems Engineering
                                               InfiNet
(757) 624-2295 (x3082)
(757) 624-2473  FAX                              
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