Hi,


I have this request from a user in our organisation. He is using an application that picks attachments emailed to a particular email ID, let's say: good-man@demo1.com.

Let's call this good-man, the Email Receiver.


So, I created the user account: good-man on the server demo1.com.

I can see the associated mail file /var/mail/good-man is looking okay as it does contain data/mails sent to good-man@demo.com from others, let's say good-woman@demo2.com.

The user is saying he wants a mail space (perhaps a directory) from where to pickup the mails/attachments sent to good-man@demo1.com.

I am not getting it.

We have sendmail on this RHEL 5 box.

So, how do I arrange for a mail lending space/directory on this box?

I think the user needs something like this:

/var/mail/god-man/:

mail1
mail2
mail3


so that his application can pick the files: mail1, mail2, etc. and do with them them whatever it is designed to.

Any idea/help here?

It would be good to know if the user is responsible for handling attachments or if the server should process them. If the user is (or can be made) responsible then I'd probably tell 'em to use an IMAP-capable client, fetch the messages and extract attachments locally. If this can't be done then you're forced to scan email for viruses, malware and PUAs and use a procmail recipe. The downside of that is that 0) not all MUAs adhere to RFCs so you may mutilate or miss an attachment, 1) extracting attachments may potentially have consequences if they're not inert and 2) you'll use more disk space and need to check mail quota / perform cleanups.