[comp.emacs] sendmail question

wendt@segovia.CS.ColoState.Edu (alan l wendt) (03/08/89)

I'm trying to set up my .forward file so that it does a few
things for me.

It would route some mailing list messages
to files instead of putting them in the /usr/spool/mail/wendt.

It would check the subject lines so that students can check in
their assignments by mailing them to me, have the assignment
compiled and verified, and mail back a reply to the student.

And the rest of the stuff wants to get put in /usr/spool/mail/wendt.
The sensible thing to do with the rest of the stuff is to pipe
it back into sendmail, with a flag saying not to do forwarding,
but I can't find such a flag on sendmail.  Suggestions anyone?

Thanks
Alan Wendt

mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) (03/08/89)

In comp.mail.misc, alan l wendt writes:
>And the rest of the stuff wants to get put in /usr/spool/mail/wendt.
>The sensible thing to do with the rest of the stuff is to pipe
>it back into sendmail, with a flag saying not to do forwarding,
>but I can't find such a flag on sendmail.  Suggestions anyone?

[ Why was this in comp.emacs? ]
[ I've directed followups to comp.mail.sendmail. ]

My sendmail man page (SunOS 4.0) describes a -n flag that means "don't do
aliasing" -- I'm not sure whether aliasing is construed to include per-user 
forwarding, but I think I recall from the sendmail source that they're 
handled in the same place, so maybe.

You might also be able to quote the recipient name by preceding it with 
a backslash.  At least, if sendmail finds a name of the form '\name' in 
a .forward file, it doesn't try to reforward the message.

Alternatively, instead of handing the stuff back to sendmail, you could 
just feed it to /bin/mail, which will deliver it to your mailbox.  I wrote 
a rule-based pattern matcher for dispatching mail based on ed-style 
regular expressions in its headers, and it uses this technique to effect 
final delivery for sites that use the sendmail / /bin/mail combination.  

In fact it derives the sender's name from the message and then uses 
"/bin/mail -r <sender> -d <recipient>" to force the "From " lines to 
contain the right name.
--
 Matt Landau			Waiting for a flash of enlightenment
 mlandau@bbn.com			  in all this blood and thunder