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Hi all,
Just presenting a brief writeup of my morning exercise with dbmail:
How to provide functionality such as offered by the famous 'vacation'
program
when using dbmail.
When you use dbmail as your default destination for a domain it is quite
difficult,
if at all possible, to use the vacation program or something similar.
These programs
assume availability of the .forward mechanism. However, if your
/etc/postfix/transport
reads:
mydomain dbmail:
or something similar, the .forward mechanism is not available.
Dbmail does provide auto_reply hooks where you store the reply messages
for users
in a separate table. Even though that would give us a much more elegant
solution, the
auto_reply mechanism at present is simply too dumb to use in a
real-world situation. The
auto_reply mechanism for instance has no memory of addresses it has
replied to, which
is one of the key features of a well behaved vacation script. You don't
want to create
mail-loops or massive numbers of auto-reply on those high-traffic
mailinglists you're on.
My recipe uses the pipe-forward mechanism in dbmail, together with a
special procmail
recipe that has all the things we like about 'vacation'. The only caveat
is that you will have
to (temporarly) activate shell accounts for all the users that require
this functionality.
Lets say you want to provide a 'vacation' auto-reply for user jack:
1) make the away-message in /home/jack/.vacation.msg
2) add the procmail recipe in /home/jack/.procmailrc:
- --<cut>--/home/jack/.procmailrc--<cut>--
SHELL=/bin/sh
VERBOSE=yes
LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail.log
:0 Whc: vacation.lock
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: $LOGNAME
| formail -rD 8196 .vacation.db
:0 ehc
| ( /usr/bin/formail -rI"Precedence: junk" -A"X-Loop: $LOGNAME" ; cat
$HOME/.vacation.msg ) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
:0:
| dbmail-smtp -u $LOGNAME
- --<cut>--/home/jack/.procmailrc--<cut>--
3) add the forwarding pipe to the aliases table in dbmail:
dbmail-adduser f [EMAIL PROTECTED] "|/usr/bin/procmail -d jack"
That's it. If you want to deactivate the vacation message, simply remove
the forwarder:
dbmail-adduser x [EMAIL PROTECTED] "|/usr/bin/procmail -d jack"
Please note:
This setup assumes that your /usr/bin/procmail is installed suid root.
This is default in debian
installations. To make sure your procmail is suid root simply execute as
root:
chown root /usr/bin/procmail
chmod +s /usr/bin/procmail
regards,
- --
~ ________________________________________________________________
~ Paul Stevens mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
~ NET FACILITIES GROUP PGP: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED]
~ The Netherlands________________________________http://www.nfg.nl
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