Re: procmail

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Sat, Dec 15, 2001 at 12:16:27PM +0100, KOZMAN Balint wrote:
> I use procmail to sort incoming mails downloaded via fetchmail among
> my internal users. The procmail rules refer to the To, cc, bcc
> headers, but if someone subscribes to a mailing list, his/her address
> won't be among these.
>
> Any ideas?

you've just discovered why POP is completely inadequate as a mail
transport protocol - it loses the envelope recipient information.

POP was never designed to do the job you're trying to make it do. it was
designed to be a protocol that allowed remote access by a user to their
personal mailbox. it does that job reasonably well.  

it was not designed to transport the mail for an entire domain...at
best, it can be kludged to do a bad imitation of that particular job
(see choice 1 below).

the same goes for IMAP.

your two choices are:

1. convince your ISP to hack their MTA to add the envelope-recipient
   info (e.g. in an "X-Envelope-Recipient" header or by somehow munging
   the To: or Delivered-To: or whatever header) when delivering mail to
   a local mailbox...and do that without compromising privacy (i.e. BCC
   means Blind Carbon Copy - other recipients are not supposed to see
   who it was delivered to)

2. use a protocol designed for the job you're trying to do. uucp is
   ideal.



btw, it's not at all uncommon to get clueless NT consultants telling you
that POP works well for this. that's because they're clueless and have
no idea how mail works. i had an MS Exchange consultant whining at me
last week, demanding to pick up his client's mail by using finger which
is, according to him, the "industry standard" for mail. i still don't
know for sure what he was crapping on about - my guess is he had one ISP
set up some ugly kludge where finger would trigger a delivery via smtp
(which is a pretty stupid and insecure idea). i told him his choices
were to either use uucp or to put up with the limitations of POP.

of course, that scary word "uucp" terrified him, even though it's
actually pretty easy to set up and there are free uucp programs that
work as an add-on to Exchange (e.g. UUPC/Extended).

speaking of uucp, does anyone have any recommendations for uucp programs
that work with Exchange? i've never used either, but have been referring
people to either UUPC/Extended[1] (free) or mailcoach[2] (commercial).

[1] http://web.kew.com:8080/kendra/uupc/
[2] http://www.mailcoach.com/


craig

PS: there's no such thing as a BCC header in incoming mail. it is
stripped either by the user-agent when sending a message or, at the
latest, by the MTA when it receives the message. it can't be used to
sort mail because it doesn't exist.


-- 
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>

Fabricati Diem, PVNC.
 -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch