On 30-Mar-01 at 11:40:52 Philip Hazel wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, John Horne wrote:
>> Yes, I tried setting 'to' and it was very close to what I wanted.
>> However, in the log file it then puts in the 'nobody' address as the
>> To: header, whereas I want the original recipient instead.
>
> There isn't an option for "log the sender of the original message whose
> arrival triggered this autoreply", which seems to be what you are trying
> to achieve.
>
Yes, that is what I wanted. I was trying to work out some combination of
options that may effect this.
>> It may sound picky, but I'm trying to get two systems to maintain
>> identical 'log' files without having to do something like copy them
>> from one system to another. In that respect one log file having the
>> true recipient and the other having the 'nobody' address is not
>> identical. Ulitmately it may be something we can live with.
>
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems to me as if 'nobody' *is* the
> true recipient of the message that the autoreply transport is sending.
>
No, not quite. We have 2 mail systems which we refer to as the 'master' and
'slave' mailhubs. The master (much like a primary dns name server) is
supposed to have the definitive information. However, in our case if the
master falls over then it means that the vacation messages we have set up
for our users (we have no users on the mailhub as such, so these are virtual
users) would get no mail. The reason being that since the vacation service
is provided by autoreply which in turn updates the once/log files, all mail
for vacation users must go to the master in order for these files to be
updated. If we didn't then it is possible for people to receive 2 notices
that someone is away since mail could arrive at either mailhub - this was not
wanted.
However, I was thinking that perhaps both systems could handle the mail
being delivered to the actual user and the slave simply pass the message to
the master with a special/specific "X-" header. This would be seen by a
director and a special transport called to update the log/once files but
throw the message away.
So, the original sender is present in the message sent to the master or
slave (obviously). However, the 'special message' sent from the slave
(although still having the original sender initially) either gets changed by
the 'to' option - and hence the To: header shows the nobody address - or if
it is not changed then the message doesn't get thrown away - again not
wanted.
Hence, I wanted a special autoreply setup to throw the message away, touch a
file, update the once and log files, and log the original sender. Phew! It
seems that I can do most of this but not all of it. I'll think some more
about this to see if we (Exim and me!) can come to a compromise with it all
:-)
John.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: jhorne@???
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