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Re: ackmail.rc not acking correctly?

1999-12-01 07:43:46
On Tue, 30 Nov 1999 20:43:11 -0500, "W. Mark Herrick, Jr."
<markh(_at_)va(_dot_)rr(_dot_)com> wrote:
So I'm trying to ack messages sent to our abuse desk (but only some
of them, see below) with an autoresponder.

Shouldn't you be using some sort of mailertable construct to route
only the mail you want to respond to to an autoresponder script
(perhaps implemented in Procmail, of course)?

PATH=$HOME:$HOME/bin:$HOME/Mail:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

This looks like a bit of overkill. $HOME and $HOME/Mail? Do you really
have runnable programs in those directories?

SENDMAIL=/usr/lib/sendmail

(You shouldn't be overriding Procmail's compiled-in value unless you
have the sort of reason which starts with "I would recompile Procmail
but ...")

INCLUDERC=ackmail.rc
Now, as I said above, I only want to ack *some* messages based upon
who they are sent to. For example, if the message is sent to (any
address)@mediaone.net, I don't want the message to be acked at all.
If the message is sent to (any address)@rr.com or (any
address)@(any region).rr.com, then I want the ack to go out.

You could of course say something like

    :0
    * ! ^TO(_at_)mediaone(_dot_)net
    { INCLUDERC=ackmail.rc }

but I'd recommend looking into the alias / mailertable / whatever
solution hinted at above.

I guess I'm having issues with setting up the variables MY_NAMES
and NOACKS, or whether I should be using the NOACKFILE variable.

As far as I can tell, NOACKFILE says who not to respond +to+, i.e. it
should contain a list of people who have asked you not to (or you
don't otherwise want to) send responses to. (Parse error, but I'm too
lazy to fix this sentence. :-)

I'm also confused about the following:

# MUA           - define as one of the keywords below to tell the
#                 recipe on how to calculate the unread mail:
#  MUA=default  - your unread mail sits in $DEFAULT (you don't filter
#                 mail into folders)
#  MUA=mh       - your mail is filtered into the MH +inbox; tries to
#                 use any Unseen-Sequence, or calculates it from the
#                 output of "folders +inbox".
#  MUA=XXXXX    - causes a recipe named "unread-XXXXX.rc" to be
#                 invoked (if it exists) to calculate the number
#                 of unread messages and returned in $UNREAD.

I have no clue what this means. It appears that none of the options
falls into what I do. I don't use $DEFAULT for everything, since I
filter into multiple mailboxes, I don't use another RC, and I
honestly don't know what MUA=mh means.

Looks like the script wants to include information about how many
messages are in the queue so it can say "I will get back to you after
I have read the other 3141592653589793 messages before yours". I don't
think you want that sort of functionality in an abuse autoresponder
anyhow.

MH is a mail reader which uses a storage format where each message is
in its own file. Calculating the number of messages in that folder
means you count the number of files in the "inbox" directory, whereas
"default" is apparently mbox, where you'd grep -c '^From ' $DEFAULT to
find the number of messages in the spool file (not necessarily unread;
Pine for example seems to be a program which will happily use the
spool file as a storage file for mail which the user has already read,
too).

It looks like you should be able to bypass this functionality simply
by not including the string UNREAD in the message (although the code
to check for this is supposed to be looking for $UNREAD, but it looks
broken to me).

Lastly, even if I do get it set up, I keep getting errors in the
log file that indicate that procmail can't find 'cat' or 'fgrep'. I
think that may be something with my path statement in my
.procmailrc, but I'm lost there as well.

Me too. Apart from the superfluous directories, your PATH looks fine.
Can you find one of the offending recipes and put something like this
just before it?

    LOG="Hi, it's me, I'm back. My PATH is now $PATH
"

where the closing quote is really supposed to be the only thing on
that line, right next to the left margin. Then run a message through
the rc file and look in the log for this information.

Hope this helps,

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