On 13 November 2001, I said:
> Hmmm, that sounds like wise advice. Would solve the whole "multiple
> recipients" problem at a stroke. Only hitch is that the addresses
> involved don't really have local accounts. Guess I could cook something
> up, but it seems more sensible to do central, per-address filtering as
> in section 47.3 of the spec. I'll play around with that.
Yes indeed, this worked like a charm. For the benefit of posterity,
here's what I did:
* added a central_filter director as in section 47.3 of the spec,
"Per-address filtering". Here's my director:
central_filter:
driver = forwardfile
file_transport = address_file
pipe_transport = address_pipe
reply_transport = address_reply
file = /etc/exim/filters/$local_part
user = mail
no_check_local_user
filter
allow_system_actions
Note that I dropped the "no_verify" option. The effect of
"no_verify", as near as I could tell, is to make it so messages
to localparts in /etc/exim/filters can only be delivered by
a local exim process, and not via a remote SMTP client.
This is Exim 3.12 (Debian potato), so that may have been fixed
in more recent versions of Exim.
* added a filter for the "webmaster" localpart (which handles
both local domains, since we don't really distinguish between
our two domains) in the file /etc/exim/filters/webmaster:
# exim filter
# This is the auto-responder for webmaster email; it is very important
# to use "to $sender_address" here, so we don't send auto-responses to
# bounce messages!
if not ($sender_address_domain is "mems-exchange.org" or
$sender_address_domain is "memsnet.org") then
mail to $sender_address
from $local_part@$domain
subject "Re: $header_subject"
expand file /etc/exim/webmaster_reply.txt
endif
deliver gward
deliver other_webmaster
deliver another_webmaster
(Since we use our webmaster address as the SMTP sender for lots
of automated mail sent out by our web site, it's particularly
important to use $sender_address, not the default $reply_address.
If I hadn't done this, then if some user enters a bogus email
address when registering with our site, then this might happen:
webmaster@??? -> bogus@??? (for various reasons)
postmaster@??? -> webmaster@??? (bounce message)
<>@mems-exchange.org -> mailer-daemon@??? (auto-response)
That would be stupid and bothersome to the admin of dom.ain, so I
want to avoid it. Not sure what would happen if dom.ain doesn't
exist at all, but I'm sure it wouldn't be pretty.
* wrote the auto-response file, /etc/exim/webmaster_reply.txt:
Thank you for your message to $local_part@$domain.
This is an automated response; while we do read all e-mail sent
to this address, we do not necessarily respond to every message.
[...]
(The rest is mainly to tell people 1) this is not how to get
a job, and 2) we're not here to do your homework. Sheesh!)
Exim is cool. Now, what *else* can I add to /etc/exim/filters...
Greg
--
Greg Ward - software developer gward@???
MEMS Exchange http://www.mems-exchange.org
