Re: [exim] OT: Extracting information from an email

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Author: Adrian Phillips
Date:  
To: Exim Users
Subject: Re: [exim] OT: Extracting information from an email
>>>>> "Steve" == Steve Dobson <steve@???> writes:

    Steve> I want remote applications to pass information between
    Steve> themselves.  The data will be in XML format (no-brainer
    Steve> these days).  For various reasons the communications link
    Steve> between the two system can not be guaranteed, so rather
    Steve> than use some direct link protocol I want to send the data
    Steve> via email.  It may be that some human intermediary will be
    Steve> part of the communications chain too.  So the system has to
    Steve> cope with data being forwarded and the like.


    Steve> For security reasons I only want to process the email if it
    Steve> was signed by a known GnuPG key.  I don't want to trust the
    Steve> From header as these are easy to forge.


I've done this for receiving meteorological data not using our "usual
channels" (direct links between countries). I wasn't keen to do so
given the importance of the data and that email transmission isn't
necessarily reliable (and to be trusted) but the powers that be
decided that it had to be :-(

Basically a forward file pipes the message into a perl program that
checks the received headers added by our gateway to verify the ip
address/helo information and, in addition, other mail headers as
necessary. It has the option to run gpg on the message but getting
other places to sign messages is a nightmare so its never been used.

Anyway, thanks to CPAN it was relatively easy to code in perl.

Sincerely,

Adrian Phillips

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