procmail filtering for nonexistant user

juu801 · 07-15-2006, 06:45 PM

I'm trying to set up a procmail filter for a user that doesn't exist on the system. Is this possible?

I wrote the filter using my account and it works perfectly. I had to create a .forward file to send my incoming mail to procmail.

In the end though I want this filter to work when mail is sent to data@host.com. Data is not a user on my system. I tried setting up a universal /etc/procmailrc file but mail is getting bounced back as undeliverable. Procmail appears to be installed setuid root.

I tried setting up a user account for data and copied the files into data's home directory. I changed the paths to reflect the move. Mail is delivered but never gets processed by procmail. I set up a .forward file just like I had for my account but it seems to be bypassed. If I manually run the mailbox through procmail it works as expected.

I'd prefer to set up a universal recipe instead of setting a user account up if thats possible. Either way though as long as it works that's what counts. Thanks for any help.

.forward

Code:

"|IFS=' ' && exec /usr/bin/procmail || exit 75 # data"

.procmailrc

Code:

LOGFILE=/home/data/procmail.log
VERBOSE=1

:0 :
# If there is an attachment run the shell script
* Content-Type: multipart/mixed
| munpack.bash

:0
#| Else reply requesting the expected files
| (formail -brt  -I 'From: <data@host.com>' ; cat $HOME/mail.msg) | $SENDMAIL -t

gilead · 07-15-2006, 09:13 PM

I use a global /etc/procmailrc for some stuff - I have sendmail invoke procmail directly so I don't need to use a forward file. Can you re-configure sendmail to do this as well? In my sendmail.mc (that sendmail.cf is built from) I have the following (I've stripped out the non-mailer stuff):

Code:

FEATURE(`local_procmail',`/usr/bin/procmail')dnl
MAILER(`local')dnl
MAILER(`smtp')dnl
MAILER(procmail)dnl

juu801 · 07-19-2006, 11:29 PM

I created the sendmail.mc file modeled after yours. I then ran

Code:

sudo m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf

Which created a sendmail.cf file. I copied that into /etc. (I couldn't find anything that stated where to place it or what to edit to tell sendmail to look at the file.) It's still a no go.

The way this will work in production is all mail will be processed by postfix. Depending on what domain it is addressed to it will either be forwarded to another server of forwarded to another port on the localhost that exim is listening on. I am concerned with the latter. The e-mails coming in to exim should be run through my procmail recipe. I'm not sure if that changes anything, I'm new to working with mail servers, MTA and the like, but I realized I hadn't included it in the first post.

gilead · 07-19-2006, 11:36 PM

Ah - using postfix does change things. Postfix is an alternative to Sendmail so the sendmail.cf file (normally kept in /etc/mail) won't be applicable. There's an article called How to get Dspam, Postfix, and Procmail to play well together which might help though.

Sorry I don't have more info on Postfix...

juu801 · 10-06-2006, 07:33 PM

It's been a while but I just realized I never posted my results here. The problem was that I had written the script with my user account which had access to the shell. The user account that I had to move this to did not. I had to had the following line in .procmailrc to get the script to execute when used under that account

Code:

SHELL=/bin/bash