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From: taylor@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jem Taylor)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re:  campus mail service
Message-ID: <16300.8902081440@vanuata.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Date: 8 Feb 89 14:40:12 GMT
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|>Is it possible to include code in a sendmail system to fuzzy match
incoming mailnames using (say) the fields of the password file as basic
data. <<

Sendmail is not the place to do this. This is a delivery agent task; once
the message has been selected for local delivery by sendmail, it is passed
to the delivery agent (usually /bin/mail); any program implementing
more intelligent delivery than /bin/mail is capable of should be declared as
the 'local' mailer and can than itself call /bin/mail for final delivery.

Having said that, some people have used IDA databases called from sendmail
to perform more complex transformations of user names than /usr/lib/aliases
allows...

Apart from that, it is generally considered unwise to deliver as the result
of a fuzzy match; instead you should return an error message listing possible
names which are 'near' the failed name, if an exact match is not found. What
constitutes an exact match is up to you of course ... but should be resistant
to changes in the user population. A name which resolves to user A should not,
next day, resolve to user B if user B is created over night.

-Jem.