Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ateng!chip
From: chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Smail, Aliases & Programs
Keywords: smail alias
Message-ID: <2561AFCE.2065@ateng.com>
Date: 15 Nov 89 18:49:48 GMT
References: <590@piglet.vision.UUCP> <974@becker.UUCP> <254733A5.10634@ateng.com> <13074@s.ms.uky.edu> <254CCBB1.19467@ateng.com> <1989Nov2.200712.163@twwells.com> <255344AF.10561@ateng.com> <1989Nov6.064722.15635@twwells.com> <2558A19B.26552@ateng.com> <1989Nov13.09
Organization: A T Engineering, Tampa, FL
Lines: 82

According to bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells):
>According to chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg):
>:  o  Do you want a mail to news gateway?
>:
>:     In the system delivery file, notice addresses that look like newsgroups;
>:     hand those messages to the gateway program.  (I did this.)
>
>This I can do easily enough. Just have aliases for the newsgroups
>I want to gateway.

Sure.  That's easy enough.  But what I meant by "notice" is to examine
the address and see if it looks like _a_ newsgroup:

    for u
    do
	case "$u" in
	news-*)
	    group=`echo $u | sed -e 's/^news-//' -e 'y/-/./'`
	    cat $HEADER $BODY | mailnews-gateway $group
	    echo DROP ;;
	*)
	    echo "$u" ;;
	esac
    done

As you can see, one routine handles _all_ newsgroups.

>Actually, I've had a slightly different interest: munging
>outgoing mail headers. An example: if I mail to a local mailing
>list, the To: line does not get a domain name.

Mm.  Not too hard.  In the system or post-user delivery file:

    for u
    do
	case "$u" in
	fake-mailing-list)
		( header -nvf To $HEADER
		  echo "To: real-mailing-list@mydomain"
		  echo ""
		  cat $BODY ) | smail -t
		echo DROP
		;;
	*)      echo "$u" ;;
	esac
    done

With this trick in place, you send mail to the fake-mailing-list.  Deliver
then mangles your mail header and hands the mangled message over to Smail,
which then delivers to real-mailing-list.

>: Which is more valuable -- your computer's time, or yours?
>The answer is "yes". :-)

I knew we could agree about something.  :-)

>Hey, I just had a thought: there is little reason for me not to
>add features that would permit easy integration of the two. I
>could look for .deliver files in user's home directories and, if
>found, run deliver for them instead of attempting normal delivery.

I like this idea.  Treat it as if the user's name were aliased:

	user:   "user|/usr/bin/deliver user"

In fact, I'd think the alias file reader might be the place to check for
whether .deliver exists.

>I have an alias bad-mail to which undeliverable mail is sent.
>I could easily add an alias, say try-mail, which is similar to this,
>except that, if mail to try-mail succeeds, no error code is returned.

Hm.  Neat.  Of course, you must have some way to interpolate the (unknown)
address into an alias.  I'll assume it's the character "@".  The typical
lmail->deliver configuration might then be:

	try-mail:       "root|/usr/bin/deliver @"
	bad-mail:       "root/Badmail"

-- 
You may redistribute this article only to those who may freely do likewise.
Chip Salzenberg at A T Engineering;  <chip@ateng.com> or <uunet!ateng!chip>