All the recipes I've seen have a line such as
# Mail loops are evil
* !^X-Loop: your(_at_)own(_dot_)mail(_dot_)address
(from the procmailex man page)
which includes the owner's email address. This is a general problem, I think,
because it
requires manipulation of the users' individual ~/.promailrc files, and it is
generally a
bad idea for any administrator to trust their users to do anything correctly.
Which is why
I'd like to have a global way of implementing a safeguard against loops, for
instance in
/etc/procmailrc. The other option would be to disallow recipes that send mail
altogether,
or to do it for each user who really wants it (only allow root to edit
~/.procmailrc),
which is not really a satisfying solution from a maintenance point of view.
I'm not just worried, I've already been burnt: One of my users had a very
simple recipe,
without any loop safeguards, to forward anything to another account. Then
someone sent him
a file with a huge (4 MB) attachment, which got forwarded to the other account,
was
rejected there because of its size, sent back to my box . . . within 24 hrs, I
had 4 GB of
traffic accumulated, precisely up to point where the 2 GB filesize limit on my
ext2 Linux
box was reached. Given the still horrendous cost of IP traffic in Europe (20
Euro per GB
is about the low end of the price spectrum in Germany), this ain't really a fun
scenario.
What's the answer here? Disallowing recipes for users or is there a less
radical solution?
Regards,
Frank
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