news@cullvax.UUCP (Mail and USENET News System maintenance account) (11/04/86)
We are considering putting in an 'anonymous mail' facility, for use as
a suggestion box. The question is, is there an easy/known way to
implement it. I tried putting a line
anonymous: "| awk ' NR != 1 && ! /^From:/ {print} ' | sendmail xxx"
in /usr/lib/aliases, so that awk would strip identifying lines from
the message and then pass them to sendmail for routing to the eventual
reader. Unfortunately, sendmail (when delivering to anonymous), runs
the command under the username of the sender of the message (which
isn't documented, but makes sense from a security point of view), so
the inner sendmail puts the original sender's name on it.
The only simple solution which comes to mind is to write a C program
that acts like the shell in setting up the pipe, and make the program
suid to our 'news' account. Is there a better way?
Dale