At 16:11 2001-12-11 -0500, some yahoo who just wrote their first mail
filter spewed an autoreply to the procmail list, using MY address as the From:
G&G CARGO INFORMA
[snip]
When are people going to learn to thoroughly *TEST* their filters before
putting them into live use?
Besides totally missing the mark with my message (the message was
text/plain - there were *NO* attachments whatsoever, and nothing even
resembling a known virus - did it trip on the mere mention of the word
"virus" ?), the filter sent the notification *AS* the originator of the
message to which they were autoreplying. Thanks a bunch, Mr. G&G Cargo.
Before putting *ANY* autoreply rule into live use, THOROUGHLY test your
recipe in a sandbox! Redefine your $SENDMAIL to execute a local script
which dumps STDIN and the arguments to a file which you can examine to see
what would have been passed to sendmail (this works both for explicitly
invoked sendmail (if you use the variable to do so), and for !forwards):
#------------- begin script (remove this line)
#!/bin/sh
# script: sendmail.sh
# author: Sean B. Straw
#
# This script is intended to be used for sandbox testing of procmail scripts
# so that we don't annoy the hell out of the universe because of some
# oversight in a script implementation. It permits you to write the body of
# your procmail script just as you would use it in a live context, but by
# redefining $SENDMAIL in your sandbox wrapper, your included script invokes
# this instead of the real MTA.
#
# To use from procmail, simply redefine $SENDMAIL:
#
# SENDMAIL=/path/to/sendmail.sh
#
# Note: if you want to define the output filename dynamically from within
# your procmail config, you could define SENDMAIL above with the filename
# as the first argument and then change this script accordingly).
#
# This script uses 'lockfile', which is a supplemental procmail utility.
#
# set mailbox name, or perhaps it is a passed argument...
MBOXNAME=test.sent.mail
# create a lockfile
if lockfile -2 -r 6 $MBOXNAME.lock; then
( echo X-MTA-Parameters: $@ ; echo X-MTA-Send-Date: `date` ; cat - ) >>
$MBOXNAME
rm -f $MBOXNAME.lock
else
# emit an error message to STDERR
echo FAILURE OF $0 > /proc/self/fd/2
# return a non-zero exit status to our caller so they know we failed
exit 1
fi
#------------- end script (remove this line)
I've used this technique for a long time and it really helps when you want
to test a ruleset but don't want to hack it to _NOT_ actually invoke the
MTA (since that would of course _change_ the ruleset operation, which is
often the source of such errors). I always run my test rulesets via an
INCLUDERC into a sandbox wrapper - so the ruleset itself shouldn't need to
change in order to be placed into a live mailstream.
I intentionally wrote it to run the echo and cat operations from within a
subshell, so as to make it a trivial modification to actually invoke the
MTA using a script-defined address (such as the author's own test address),
and pass the modified message (with the two additional headers) to that MTA
invocation (hint: replace ">> $MBOXNAME" with "| sendmail -oi
someuseraddr", and you can eliminate all the locking as well). The
execution cost of this script isn't a major concern since it is used for
testing only.
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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