[KLUG Members] Forward with Sendmail

[Peter Buxton]

> Or, you can do it the right way, and run a real mail package like Cyrus
> IMAPd and let users setup forwards/filters/blocks via SIEVE.  Then you
> get really good vacation message functionality, etc... which otherwise
> really sucks on UNIX/LINUX unless your a procmail hacker.

/me tentatively raises his hand... :)

I'm not a procmail guru, but regexp and pipes (and the vacation program)
aren't a huge deal. The most difficult thing about .procmailrc is setting
the order in which the lines go.

Sieve is all right, but I must admit to a huge frustration with certain
things in general about many new packages.

Logrotate, for instance, is nice enough, but it doesn't allow for much
creative log file scripting. On the one hand, this reduces errors. On the
other, this reduces possible new functionality. I just had a typo in the
venerable (1987) savelog bash script -- nothing huge, just a missing
double semi-colon in a select block -- but that did cause two daily
scripts to abort. (More, if I hadn't moved this functionality to
logrotate.)

So, it is perhaps a good thing that a well-defined and parsed conf file,
with a much simpler syntax than sh and a 31KB binary is doing the job. I
mean, log rotation is hardly cutting edge, so let's stick it in this
package.

However, I find myself looking at sieve with a certain amount of
misgiving. I'm not saying the Cyrus people should have replaced it with
procmail, as sieve is a different beast. And yes, I have written and
installed a small sieve script by hand, using vacation and all that. But I
do wonder about replacing much of the script extensibility of Unix with
Another Small Language.

I've been looking at ESR's bogofilter:

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/bogofilter/
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

At CARES, I've installed the Cyrus POP3 server (hopefully a precursor to
installing IMAP). I would be unable to try bogofilter except for Exim and
procmail. See, cyrdeliver is the "local_deliver" transport, but the
local_deliver transport is, by default, second choice to the "forward" or
"procmail" transport. Which is to say, if you have these files in ~, Exim
routes accordingly. So everyone else uses POP3 and I use procmail, which
is just how I like it.

Now, when will the Cyrus people adapt bogofilter, or some future successor
to bogofilter, into sieve? Or will I have to filter all mail through
procmail, and have procmail deliver it with a cyrdeliver command to my
particular internal mailboxes? Or should I pipe the mail, in exim.conf,
through a bogofilter command that itself calls cyrdeliver?

What happens when you get a spam that gets filtered into your Inbox?
Bogofilter has a method to retag a message, but how does the IMAP user use
it? Since IMAP leaves one great function to the user, that of moving mail
to and fro, I would imagine a Spam folder for mail tagged as spam, and a
Toggle-Spam folder, where you would copy misdirected mail for the
reassignment procedure.

The other method.... well, is pretty insecure. Burying code (even shell
scripts and options) in sieve is scary. I do hope, however, that ACL's,
fine-grained permissions and threads allow Linux a lightweight sandboxing
utility, and that we do can and do use it.

Anyway. This is just me bringing things up that have no practical value.

-- 
for gpg key - http://www.killdevil.org/~peter
You can fill my head with Gummi Bears,
but I won't talk! -- Tom Servo, K13.