2001-01-08-13:02:00 Kevin Wormington:
> Perhaps my terms of header and envelope are confused. When I
> say header I'm referring to the information looked at by the
> smtp (mta) and what I'm calling the envelope is the information
> apparently ignored by an mta.

Well, you're using the terms exactly backwards to how they're used
in this area; email server admins use "envelope" to refer to the
part the MTA acts on, that's passed in the RCPT FROM and MAIL TO
commands of the SMTP dialogue, and "header" to refer to the part
containined within the message DATA --- "To:", "Cc:", and other
such, which the MTA does not act on.

What you're asking for is the ability to check the message header
fields --- To and Cc --- to make sure they contain the valid
address, i.e. outlawing Blind Carbon Copies (Bcc). As you rightly
point out, this then places you in the position of having to
maintain a list of all mailing lists, since they always Bcc their
receipients.

What I'd recommend you do is pursue this in the local delivery
agent, since it easily supports per-user configuration. If you were
to use procmail as the system-wide local delivery agent, you could
put an /etc/procmailrc that reads

        :0 fwh
        * ! ^TO_$LOGNAME$HOSTNAME$
        | formail -A X-Spam-Info: bcc

Then users who wanted to discard suspected spam according to the
rule "if it's Bcc-ed to me, and it's not mailing list traffic, it
must be spam" could filter their mailing lists out into one or more
inboxes first, then have, right before the final (possibly default)
disposition of delivering to the inbox, a last check

        :0
        * ^X-Spam-Info: bcc
        /dev/null

to toss the non-mailing-list Bccs. This puts the job of maintaining
the list of all mailing lists in the only place it can possibly be
done, in per-user config.

-Bennett

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQE6WgSEHZWg9mCTffwRApx1AJ4zVIwuq32VuicTAYPdcqlmr5eoJACggDpe
N6gJuexlaniD6iPI0Vvw/ug=
=zVpn
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]