On Sat, Sep 01, 2001 at 12:37:46AM -0400, Dan Lowe wrote:
> Previously, Robert Lister said:
> >
> > Is there a way I can hack something up for example make my filter
> > write a list of message ID's to a little file in my home directory
> > (say, the last 20 message IDs) and then before it decides.
>
> No; you can do this with Procmail, but not with an Exim filter. If you
> want to try the Procmail method out, you can use this recipe:
>
> :0 Wh: $HOME/.msgid.lock
> | formail -D 8192 $HOME/.msgid.lock
Argh! I've just moved *off* procmail!
(I was hoping there was going to be a neat little exim
equivalent of this.)
> Keep in mind that you can't just fork Procmail out of an Exim filter and
> have this work (nor can you fork formail and have it work) because you
> can't check the return code of an external program called by a filter.
> If you want to try this you'd have to switch to Procmail rather than using
> an Exim filter (which not everyone wants to do).
I thought it was worth the hassle converting my procmail stuff
(which was on another machine running sendmail) to exim filters
because it seems more efficient.
I've seen a site with 80+ users on, and whenever somebody
sent to staff@, the box then has to invoke (potentially)
80 procmails and 80 more "formails" for every message
directed to a list.
For a busy list, this overhead can be quite considerable,
and I imagine this situation would be even worse at larger sites.
Surely this is madness. So what does a site like, say,
the University of Cambridge do? :-)
Procmail? Surely not????
Regards,
Rob
--
Robert Lister - robl@??? - http://www.lentil.org
