Good to see things working again.

I hesitated to complain but what the hell, I whine about everything
these days.

I was very serious when I was asking for working examples of this kind
of setup.  I know that any kind of undertaking involving sendmail and
procmail will lead into a bloody mess.  Out of nearly 300 people on
the list I got no concrete examples, just to vague descriptions of
what to do (nothing I didn't already know).

So it took two complete evenings to get it to run until my first test
message, which actually went through.  procmail doesn't send to
stdout, closes stdout and is overall incooperative with working as an
actual filter.  I didn't want temporary files as that makes things
more fragile.  So I did cat 1>&3 inside from a procmail rule and 3>&1
outside from a script which works around the problem of procmail
closing stdout and stderr.  Except when running the thing from
sendmail I discovered that sendmail somehow even prohits this (don't
actually know why, but if you call the script with 3>&1 in it things
called from the script call send to fd 3.  Not that it's possible but
it is what it is).  Second evening had me plug listar into the
procmailrc since there was no way to turn that freakin thing into a
pipe-able program.  Now I transport the listname by environment
variable and other stuff I wanted to avoid.  But sure enough, my test
message got through and the test spam was blocked.  Ugly but what can
you do?

Except nobody else could send to the list.

Took another evening to discover why: the procmailrc was owned by me
and when executed from sendmail procmail is run by root and refuses to
use any procmailrc not owned by root.  Not printing an error message
or something either, no syslog entry.  No control know to turn this
off and delare somebody a trusted user.

So how did the test message get through and how did the spam I bounded
through procmail got into the spam folders?

My test messages were sent on the local machine and hence the whole
sendmail/procmail/listar chain was executed under my userid.  Since
that is the userid that owns the procmailrc it worked.  But it would
not work for anything coming in over TCP/IP.

Can't even blame sendmail for much of this.  Procmail is just lacking
in being reused in standard unix ways, as filter, with ownerships
allowable etc.

But over the weekend 179 spam messages have been killed so I guess it
was worth it.  Mind you I didn't see any of that before, because I had
these filters in my user account ;-)

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   http://www.cons.org/cracauer/
 No warranty.    This email is probably produced by one of my cats 
 stepping on the keys. No, I don't have an infinite number of cats.


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