procmail
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Re: Problems with FORMAIL

1997-06-17 13:42:00
I had said, mistakenly,

| > If procmail is not the MDA but is called from .forward by the recipient,
| > nothing in /etc/procmailrc will do any good.

Stefan Monnier corrected me:

| Well, the manpage seems to imply that /etc/procmailrc is executed in most
| cases (and not just when run from sendmail, which makes sense since sendmail
| has quite a few ways to start it and some of them resemble tremendously to
| what you would get from ~/.forward):

Oops ... yes, you're quite right, Stefan.  Thanks for pointing that out.  I
had the right resuts, but the wrong analysis, so let me try again:

  If the system administrator has not installed procmail as the MDA but
  the recipient is invoking procmail from .forward, there isn't going to
  be an /etc/procmailrc to put a shell assignment into.

Stefan also revised an earlier statement he made:

| Then, reread my statement as "procmail should ignore the user's login shell"
| (just like "make" should ignore SHELL).

I don't know about that.  That would make procmail extremely unpopular with
administrators, not just as an MDA but even for allowing from .forward.
There's a reason, valid or invalid, that an administrator assigns a user a
dummy or do-nothing or restricted shell, and a binary that circumvents it
would not be very welcome on such a system.

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