Good morning!
A few thoughts and a question for anyone thinking about web mail.
At UKC we are currently evaluating a web mail based system (similar
interface to hotmail - don't say a word).
We currently use exim 2.12 to ship mail in and out of UKC and things are
real good - cheers Phil.
The web based mail engine is IMP from the horde project (
www.horde.org),
which for those of you who don't know uses the PHP scripting language
hooked into apache.
The problem (?) that we have noticed is that exim logs the sender of
the message as the user that the webserver runs as (nobody), which
admittedly is correct :-) However we would prefer it to show the
user that sent the mail via the web server rather than the webserver.
The 'From' line in the header is correct as we are not letting the user
touch that bit in Imp, but that doesn't currently show in our exim logs
(yes it could probably be turned on, but would be inconsistent as our
other mailers - netscape/simeon/pine etc do allow the from address to
be tweaked, but in those cases the envelope sender is correct).
Therefore an inconsistency arises.
The question therefore is as follows: Do we hack:
a. imp so that it generates extra logs showing who logged in and
sent the mail (as the user nobody) we are happy with the
authentication of the user logging in to the web server
as we are using IMAP authentication for each users mail box at UKC
(which is the same authentication for any other mailer here)..
or
b. a system filter into exim so that the envelope sender gets
rewritten to the from address when the sender is nobody.
Thoughts, comments and sarcastic remarks are welcome!
A copy of a sample header and the exim log entry for the same mail follows
at the end of this message.
Cheers
Paul Osborne
Computing Officer
UKC Computing Service
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MAIL
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Received: from pear.ukc.ac.uk ([129.12.21.139])
by apple.ukc.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 2.12 #1)
id 11A7Sp-0006iq-00
for pao@???; Fri, 30 Jul 1999 08:52:23 +0100
Received: from nobody by pear.ukc.ac.uk with local (Exim 2.12 #1)
id 11A7Sp-0004Zf-00
for P.A.Osborne@???; Fri, 30 Jul 1999 08:52:23 +0100
Errors-to: dc16@???
Reply-to: Darren Chapman <D.Chapman@???>
Mime-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
X-mailer: IMP/PHP3 Imap webMail Program 2.0.7
Message-id: <E11A7Sp-0004Zf-00@???>
Sender: Nobody <nobody@???>
From: Darren Chapman <D.Chapman@???>
To: P.A.Osborne@???
Subject: test
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 08:52:23 +0100
test from dc16
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EXIM LOG
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1999-07-30 08:52:23 11A7Sp-0004Zf-00 <= nobody@??? U=nobody P=local S=717
1999-07-30 08:52:23 11A7Sp-0004Zf-00 => ~pao@??? <P.A.Osborne@???> R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp H=apple.ukc.ac.uk [129.12.21.134]
1999-07-30 08:52:23 11A7Sp-0004Zf-00 Completed
