At 9:11 +0200 3/4/2002, Petri Laatunen wrote:
>We're some blind and visually impaired working here and one thing which
>might be very nice is if we could convert Word attachments into text ones
>during mail delivery. We have all the software we need and I just thought
>if local_scan() could be used to launch the conversion process after virus
>checking, of course ;)
I think this sort of thing fits better into a mail delivery agent than into
SMTP end-of-receipt-of-body time of a mail transfer agent.
For one thing, local_scan() has a very hard time doing things on a per
recipient basis...would you really want the attachments converted for all
users because some users do better with text (including recipients who turn
out to be on some remote machine after all)?
As commonly set up, Exim acts as mail delivery agent...but it doesn't have
to do so. Router time (Exim 4, as implied by the presence of
local_scan())--or even later--would seem to be the time to decide how to
deliver a message to each of its recipients...the router might just deliver
blindly to the MDA and let it do the deciding, or the router might pick one
of several MDAs (including Exim itself for the simple cases).
--John
--
John Baxter jwblist@??? Port Ludlow, WA, USA
