I have been using procmail auto-reply for long but recently came
to wonder about some of its options.
e.g. I had following recipe:
:0
* ^(To|Cc):(_dot_)*someone(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)internet
* B?? ((where|what) is the (form|address))
|formail -r -i "Subject: auto-reply"|(cat; cat $INFO/faq.txt) \
| $SENDMAIL -t
In stead replying to only the mail sender, it also replied to
addresses on the "To:" field (which is a list, and caused some
loops of course). Scared of such a wild behaviour, I am using
the following currently:
Best way to prevent loops is to inject a header for the form
X-loop: <my auto reply system>
Use the presence of this header to ensure the recipe fails.
FROM=`formail -rt -xFrom:`
:0
* ^(To|Cc):(_dot_)*someone(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)internet
* B?? ((where|what) is the (form|address))
| formail -rt -i "Subject: auto-reply"|(cat; cat $INFO/faq.txt) \
| $SENDMAIL -oi -t $FROM
I know I am doing things redundent here and not necessary, but not
quite sure exactly what does option "-t" do after "formail" and
after "SENDMAIL" (I read the man page but still not clear ... ;-)
"sendmail -t" causes sendmail to scan the missive for addresses. Therefore
the To: and cc: headers in the incomimg mail will be used as destinations.
I don't know the effect of -t together with commandline addresses; I'd
guess it's one of
1 An error. Mail goes nowhere.
2 Not an error. Mail goes to all addresses.
--
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
Configuration, networking, combined IBM ftpsites index.