Circa 2002-08-14 22:54:39 -0700 dixit Ross Boylan:
: At 01:09 AM 8/15/02 -0400, Jim Knoble wrote:
:
: >How are you receiving your mail now? Via POP/IMAP, or via some other
: >method?
:
: POP3
Yuck. You won't have much luck with this. See below.
: >If you have any measure of control over the mail server that parses
: >local parts for your domain, then you should use local-part prefixes or
: >suffixes for this.
:
: Thanks, I didn't know about that. Unfortunately, the + trick does seem to
: work with my ISP, but it does not work with my "permanent" address. To add
: insult to injury, the failure message comes from exim on their end! Here
: it is:
That's probably because exim doesn't come configured that way out of
the box, as qmail does. It can be tricky to set up right.
: >Alternatively, if you don't have that much control over the upstream
: >server (for example, your ISP is unable or unwilling to implement
: >local-part suffixes or prefixes), you may wish to subscribe to an
: >aliasing service such as pobox.com.
:
: Does this give enough information to sort things out? I really need
: the original address the message was sent to, and that still seems
: to be obscured. Suppose someone sends mail To: karen@???,
: ross@???. How do I know, when I'm handling a particularly
: delivery, which recipient it is for?
You don't without inspecting the header fields. If you're retrieving
your mail with POP or IMAP, though, that's the *only* way to detect the
intended recipient of the message, because the implied envelope
recipient is you@???. As you note, it's not necessarily a very
good method (what if, for example, someone Bcc's a message to your
wife? The Bcc field isn't supposed to appear in the header). Mailing
lists, in particular, can be problematic.
: >You may find that procmail or similar delivery agents are better suited
: >for distinguishing addresses in headers and acting on them.
:
: Why do you say that?
Here's a ~/.procmailrc containing a recipe that delivers to a mailbox
called 'karen' if 'karen@???' appears in one of the recipient
fields (To:, CC:, Resent-To:, Resent-CC:):
UMASK=07
:0:
* ^TO_karen@???
/path/to/karens/mailbox
:0:
$DEFAULT
I find that rather easy to do. You may not; it was merely a suggestion.
If you like exim's filter language and can accomplish what you need
there, then fine.
Your best bet, however, is going to involve distinguishing envelope
recipients. The easiest way to do this is to set up another address
with your ISP, and have the mail delivered to a separate POP mailbox.
Then you don't have problems with Bcc:s or mailing lists or header
parsing or anything.
--
jim knoble | jmknoble@??? |
http://www.pobox.com/~jmknoble/
(GnuPG fingerprint: 31C4:8AAC:F24E:A70C:4000::BBF4:289F:EAA8:1381:1491)
