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Re: NIS aliases

1997-03-18 17:51:18
"Mark A. Crother" <crotherm(_at_)roses(_dot_)bna(_dot_)boeing(_dot_)com> writes:
I have procmail 3.10 running on an Alpha running Digital Unix 3.2.  I
have configured my sendmail 8.8.5 to use procmail as its local delivery
agent.  The problem I am seeing is when I use procmail to send mail
(called as mail) it cannot understand NIS aliases, or local aliases for
that matter.  I have looked through all the docs I could find, but saw
no hints for this behavior.  Is this a know limitation? 

The work around I used was to defined /bin/procmail as the deliver agent
instead of /bin/mail where /bin/mail was procmail renamed.  This made it
possible for programs which called /bin/mail (now the real one) to send 
a message to an alias.  But I still would like to find out why procmail did
not check my aliases file.

Because that's not procmail's job.  Making /bin/mail procmail really is
only a workaround for those whose systems which can't be convinced to
use something other than /bin/mail to deliver mail.  To quote the
examples/advanced file from the distribution, right after it mentions
doing this it then says:

        Beware, however, that if you are using this method, /bin/mail
        can *only* be used to deliver mail.  On many systems /bin/mail
        has several uses (also to read mail or check for mail).  So, it
        would definitely be preferred if you could edit the invocation
        of /bin/mail from within your mail transport agent to invoke
        procmail instead (with appropriate flags, if needed).  Special
        directions detailing this process for some of the more popular
        MTAs are included in subsections below.

That should probably be amended to mention that aliases and other MTA
magic will be ignored.

Since you're using sendmail 8.8.5, you can just change the local mailer
definition and leave /bin/mail alone, letting sendmail call procmail
directly,... as you ended up doing.  In fact, the m4 config file
generators include a specific "FEATURE" file for doing this, so that
you can just add
        FEATURE(local_procmail, `/path/to/procmail')
to your .mc file, then rebuild your .cf file.


Philip Guenther

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