dattier@vpnet.chi.il.us (David W. Tamkin) (06/08/91)
As long as I was going to post my problems with filter anyway, let me wrap up something from before: syd@DSI.COM wrote in <1991Jun7.124338.22240@DSI.COM>: | That trick, will produce a From: header, but its not a good trick. | | [detail of the possible repercussions] Well, I guess that Elm and the MTA's on the sites where I've done that have been configured funny, because by dumb luck I've always come up with exactly one From: line whether I had a From: in .elm/elmheaders or not. The only times I've generated two From: lines were when I had one in .elm/elmheaders and used the headers screen to add another as a user-defined header. Now, to my questions about filter. 1. Save and Savecopy require the full path to the name of the destination folder. I've had no luck trying to specify them relative to "~" or to "$HOME" or with a path that just starts from my home directory. The man page for filter says that filter uses /etc/passwd to find an addressee's $HOME, but apparently it uses it only to locate the .elm/filter(-rules|log|sum) files and not to interpret folder names mentioned in the filter rules. But at least three times in my Unix-using history I've found that a sysadmin has reorganized the storage and moved a lot of users' home directories and all subtrees under them whole to new locations. Since the administrators who did that also changed the $HOME listed in /etc/passwd, it was all pretty transparent to most users. But if destination folders in .elm/filter-rules have to be named with full paths from /, what happens from the time the user's $HOME is changed until the user logs in, finds out, and changes his or her .elm/filter-rules? Is there some way to name destination folders from $HOME rather than from /? 2. Execute - Aargh! The one and only example of an execute in the Filter Guide (May 1, 1990) is of feeding a letter to cat -. Well, luckily, cat accepts "-" as a synonym for "use standard input for this argument." How does one use "execute" to feed a letter as standard input to some other command? Must one write "cat - | command" and run an extra process? Neither "| command" nor "command" seems to work. This is in Elm 2.3, pl 11, but I don't know the hardware or OS data. 3. Finally, other than the one exception provided by savecopy, is it possible to leave a letter in the incoming mailbox *and* do something else, particularly forward it or execute a command on it? Filter's "forward" and "execute" commands keep the affected letters out of the default mailbox. I imagine one could do nasty kludgy things like using savecopy to a folder that is really a named pipe or using execute to feed it to a script that does other things but also appends it to the default mailbox. Maybe one can name more than one recipient in a forward command in the filter rules (the Filter Guide doesn't say), but if one can, it would then return to one's own incoming mail as a letter from oneself, not from the original writer, correct? If it would come back as a letter from the original author, wouldn't it fall into the same filter rule and get forwarded again and again in a very undesirable loop? Thank you for any information or assistance. David Tamkin PO Box 7002 Des Plaines IL 60018-7002 dattier@vpnet.chi.il.us GEnie:D.W.TAMKIN CIS:73720,1570 MCIMail:426-1818 708 518 6769 312 693 0591 "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" mailing list: flamingo-request@esd.sgi.com (relay) flamingo-request@ddsw1.mcs.com (digest)
dattier@vpnet.chi.il.us (David W. Tamkin) (06/08/91)
One of my questions in <1991Jun07.200134.16973@vpnet.chi.il.us> read: | Filter's "forward" and "execute" commands keep the affected letters out of | the default mailbox. Maybe one can name more than one recipient in a | forward command in the filter rules (the Filter Guide doesn't say), but if | one can, it would then return to one's own incoming mail as a letter from | oneself, not from the original writer, correct? One can list more than one forwardee (including real-oneself) in a forward command in .elm/filter-rules, thus keeping a copy and not making a loop, but it does arrive as a letter from "The Filter of [oneself]," and r)eplying won't get addressed to the author but rather to the forwarder. It isn't quite what I hoped for. David Tamkin PO Box 7002 Des Plaines IL 60018-7002 dattier@vpnet.chi.il.us GEnie:D.W.TAMKIN CIS:73720,1570 MCIMail:426-1818 708 518 6769 312 693 0591