procmail
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Re: Sending entire mail folders to someone (yourself)

1999-09-24 09:49:51
1999-09-23-22:01:44 Philip Guenther:
Dallman Ross <dman(_at_)netcom(_dot_)com> writes:
 formail -Y -s sendmail me(_at_)account2 < /path/to/mailbox

I use this a lot, but hadn't seen the -Y flag to formail.  I
just looked.  Is there a danger if it's not used?  Are Content-Length:
fields somehow bad?  (-Y causes ignore to them.)

If you don't use Content-Length: fields locally then any that appear in
received mail messages may contain completely bogus values.  Consider what
would happen if someone sent you a mail message (like _this_ one, heh
heh) with a Content-Length: of, say, 999999.  Try splitting a mailbox
with that message in the middle of it using formail _without_ the -Y
flag and see what happens.

If you don't set it yourself, you should _never_ trust it.

Cool! I'd never thought of that! It really hadn't occurred to me that a basic
tool would have its default behavior needing to be overriden so urgently.

I don't suppose there's any chance that we could get an environment variable
or a config variable in an rc file or some such "sticky" way to disable this?

Meanwhile, for those of us who are content to lose backward-compatiblity in
the "-Y" behavior, here's a teensy source-code patch, which I made against
3.13.1; it simply inverts the sense of the -Y option, so if you do nothing
Content-Length is ignored, and if you want formail to trust it you use -Y.
Wasn't there a 3.14 series under development at one time that supported
Maildir? Or am I confused? I can't find it on ftp.procmail.org.

-Bennett

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