jaynes@med.umich.edu (William Jaynes) (12/20/90)
Is there any version of sendmail that allows for inexact addresses. I know that
the FUZZY option in the IDA version enables a last ditch matching on the name
field in /etc/passwd. Is this available using some arbitrary file other than
/etc/passwd? The senario I'm thinking of is the following:
- Mail comes in.
- Sendmail resolves it local and tries to deliver
- Delivery fails
- Before bouncing the message, sendmail takes the local part of the
address and tries some kind of matching within some file.
- If some match succeeds sendmail tries to deliver using what was returned
- If that fails then bounce the message
Anything like this out there?Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM (12/20/90)
AMDS (Andrew Message Delivery System, part of the Andrew software available on the X.V11R4 tape) functions as a back-end to sendmail--or any other mailer--in the way that you suggest. That is, it is a local mail delivery system that runs addresses through a heuristic match if the straightforward match fails. It's well suited for running on top of AFS, in which the number of ``local users'' in an AFS cell can range up to 10^4 (and beyond). To hook sendmail to AMDS, you have to tell sendmail to leave local addresses alone, which means that you have to invent another mailer besides the one called ``local'', and send all local mail to that new mailer (which is just the submission point to AMDS). You do run a risk when you deliver to heuristic name matches. When I was more involved with andrew.cmu.edu, we decided to bounce mail unless there was an exact match for surname or userid. This doesn't stop AMDS from bouncing even a unique fuzzy match: it simply tells you a bit about the user and lets you know a working address for that person. Send a message to somerandomaddress@andrew.cmu.edu for an example. Craig
wolfgang@wsrcc.com (Wolfgang S. Rupprecht) (12/22/90)
>You do run a risk when you deliver to heuristic name matches. When I >was more involved with andrew.cmu.edu, we decided to bounce mail unless >there was an exact match for surname or userid. Even this is often risky. We used to chuckle everytime some fuzzy matcher sent mail for a person called 'nancy' to our usenet site called 'nancy'. The mail usually got dumped on postmaster since it didn't even have a local user name on it - the address stopped at the machine name! -wolfgang -- Wolfgang Rupprecht wolfgang@wsrcc.com (or) uunet!wsrcc!wolfgang Snail Mail Address: Box 6524, Alexandria, VA 22306-0524
paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu (Paul Pomes - UofIllinois CSO) (12/22/90)
jaynes@med.umich.edu (William Jaynes) writes: >Is there any version of sendmail that allows for inexact addresses. I know that >the FUZZY option in the IDA version enables a last ditch matching on the name >field in /etc/passwd. Is this available using some arbitrary file other than >/etc/passwd? The senario I'm thinking of is the following: > - Mail comes in. > - Sendmail resolves it local and tries to deliver > - Delivery fails > - Before bouncing the message, sendmail takes the local part of the > address and tries some kind of matching within some file. > - If some match succeeds sendmail tries to deliver using what was returned > - If that fails then bounce the message This is no big deal to do. Replace the #ifdef'ed FUZZY code in recipient.c with your customized code. Henry Spencer's regex package could be used to good effect. A lot depends on what you want to do and the worst-case consequences of mis-delivered mail. /pbp -- Paul Pomes UUCP: {att,iuvax,uunet}!uiucuxc!paul Internet, BITNET: paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu US Mail: UofIllinois, CSO, 1304 W Springfield Ave, Urbana, IL 61801-2910