At 12:56 PM 7/17/97 -0400, Barry wrote:
Hi everyone. I'm getting pretty good at using procmail for my own mail,
but now I want to do something for the whole system, and I'm hesitant about
messing with EVERYONE's mail!
As you should be.
I want to save attachments over a certain size, say 2mb's, to a special
folder in /tmp. In place of this, i want the users recieving this mail to
In /tmp? No, make a directory under spool or something, but certainly
don't drop it in /tmp -- is your critical mail /tmp?
get a mail from the system informing them that they recieved a large mail
and that they should call the office to arrange something.
What do you guys think? It should be pretty trivial to set up, but I was
hesitant to do something, the way that procmail is, for the whole system
without checking on this list first...
Well, I see my mail as a sacred thing. As a user, I certainly wouldn't
like having to arrange to get a large archive that may have been sent to me
(say, because it is TIME-CRITICAL, and was emailed specifically because
snailing media would be too slow).
Trivial is a relative term - I've never attempted to do such a thing, so I
don't know if it is or not, but I imagine you'll have a couple of problems,
one of which is dealing with attachment types (MIME, UU, BINHEX, etc.) - or
are you going to route the WHOLE message, untouched, into a separate
folder? If so, is the recipient going to even get some context from the
original message so they have some clue what it is about? How do you plan
to deal with mailbombs?
What EXACTLY is this supposed to gain for you? You're spooling the mail
somewhere, so it isn't as if you're not storing the large messages when
they come in (in fact, you're creating more load and mail traffic because
of the additional processing steps, notification, etc.).
I can almost understand the possible desire to do this, but it really
becomes a drawback for the people getting mail (do they have to wait for
regular business hours or a workday to get their handled mail?), and also a
liability for you (oops, what happened to that message, I swear I put it in
here... oh, a teensy bug in this script..).
Of course, this all depends on the nature of the system you're running -
perhaps this is all fine and well with the users. In a corporate
environment (which it sounds like you're in - "call the office"), you can
pretty much dictate anything you want, and the users have to live with it
(though this isn't necessarily good policy). OTOH, in a commercial (ISP,
usergroup, whatever) environment, the users will pretty quickly rebel
against you if they don't like it.
Perhaps you could detail some of the reasoning for wanting to do this? Is
it because all your users are over slow modem connections, and you want to
be able to copy the message to a floppy to save them hours of online time
(note that then they'll have to deal with somehow re-introducing it into
their mail client).
---
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Post Box 2395 / San Rafael, CA 94912-2395