At 14:31 2000-09-26 +0300, Vyacheslav Zakharov wrote:
:0 fh
Why are you using the filter flag (f) ? This appears to be a final
delivery (since you pipe it out to sendmail)
* $^To:.*${LOGNAME}
Remove braces from variable names (this applies to the delivery recipe as
well). Look at some examples from 'man procmailex'
* ^Subject: ping$
space+tab, to account for different MUA styles:
* ^Subject:[ ]*ping$
BTW, the formail invocation below should inject an "Re:" in front of the
subject, so what was your problem again?
* !^X-Loop:
Should have a specific address in here (as you set it below).
echo Sample ping responder \
why not just change the subject line to something appropriate?
everybody know what is X-Loop header for. but when i am going to send a
reply to a responder message i can see that X-Loop header doesn't include
into my reply. thus the * !^X-Loop: checking is completely useless.
Apparently not everybody know what the X-Loop header for.
You don't just check for "x-loop", you check for a specific content - like
ping(_dot_)robot(_at_)my(_dot_)domain(_dot_) This is there to avoid server-level autoreplies,
redirects/remote forwards, and some bounces (though DAEMON and MAILER are
intended to catch most of those).
Arguably, if you don't want to be replying to certain other (presubably
bots and some small lists) inquiries, you could check for X-Loop as a
generic header, but this isn't what it was intended for.
i checked it both with my mutt-1.2.5 and microsoft outlook express 4.
If someone actually REPLIES to your message, then there was presumably
human intervention. If someone continues to reply repeatedly, it's not a
whole lot different than them being idiotic enought to queue several
hundred fresh requests instead, none of which would have been replies
through your server.
I'm well aware that many MUAs (at least in the Windows environ) support
auto-replies - rules by which the app may queue a reply/forward/redirect
based on incoming messages.
i suspect that this problem occures on other mua's.
This is not a "problem". Works as designed.
what should i add into my recipe to avoid this?
You could take a look at some vacation recipes and build yourself a
datafile of email addresses to whom you have sent such ping responses, and
if an address appears in the file (you grep it), then you don't autoreply
to it. Periodically (under a cron, or possibly using a script that gets
invoked on certain new mail), you delete the datafile. Could be daily, or
hourly, or whatever (hourly should be sufficient to bin loops that might
come from MUA autoreplies).
It all depends on the perceived threat, and how much effort you want to put
into dealing with braindead, uh, I mean, IQ-challenged, users.
---
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
_______________________________________________
procmail mailing list
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail