Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 14:31:59 -0600
From: Philip Guenther <guenther@gac.edu>
To: "Robert E. Gahl" <bgahl@thesphere.com>
cc: procmail@Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE
Subject: Re: Can't come up with the right recipe... 
Message-Id: <199611262032.OAA27583@solen.gac.edu>

"Robert E. Gahl" <bgahl@thesphere.com> writes:
>I use procmail in combination with sendmail to direct our virtual user
>account mail. That is, I direct all inbound mail for a given domain to a
>single user account, and then use procmail within that account to redirect
>the mail to individual user accounts. It looks something like this:
>
>sendmail rule:
>
>	R$*<@virtualdomain.com>	$#local$:vdomain
>
>Then, in the vdomain account is a .forward with:
>
>	"|exec /usr/local/bin/procmail USER=vdomain"

Hmm, looks like you've lost the envelope recipient.  Let's see if
that's what you're looking for:

...
>Here's the problem. Some of our users subscribe to mailing lists whose To
>field is something other than their name. I can see the actual recipient
>usually in the first 'Received: from . . . for <username@virtualdomain.com>
>id . . . .' but I can't derive a rule that will operate within the above
>parameters. Anyone have a rule out there which can solve this?

Sure enough, you've lost the envelope recipient and now you're
wondering how to get it back.  The answer is that you cannot do so from
inside procmail.  You need to change your sendmail config, period.  A
correct "virtual domain" setup will have a .mc file (for sendmail's m4
config process) that contains lines like:

FEATURE(mailertable)		# possibly with a second arg
MAILER(procmail)


with a mailertable entry that looks like:

virtualdomain.com	procmail:/path/to/procmailrc/here


Then in the procmailrc /path/to/procmailrc/here you would put:


SENDER = $1
RECIPT = $2

:0
* RECIPT ?? ^someuser@
! -f $SENDER username@pop2.mailhost.com


etc.

DO NOT THINK YOU CAN DO THIS WITHOUT ALTERING YOUR SENDMAIL CONFIG.
You noticed how the Received: line will sometimes say "for <users...>".
Don't bother trying to match on that, as it doesn't work in at least
two cases (resent mail, and multiple recipients).  Do it right, or
don't bother doing it all.

You should also consider taking a look at the archives of this list, as
the discussion about this has been rehashed twice this month already.


>Secondly, the more I read the man page, the more I'm convinced that the
>(^TO|^CC|^BCC) is redundant and should just be ^TO. Am I correct?

Assuming you want to match against the destination headers, then yes,
you should just say:

:0
* ^TOsome-address
...


If that looks confusion you can stick some parens in to break it up
visually:

* (^TO)some-address
* ^TO(some-address)
* ^TO()some-address

Those should all work the exact same.


Philip Guenther

PS. I'm sorry if I seem overly harsh in the above.  It's just that this
comes up fairly regularly, and it seems that about half the time they
refuse to accept the answer.  <sigh>  It's just frustrating...