Due to the legal requirement of having to add a disclaimer at the end of all outgoing e-mails I downloaded and installed “cvgfilter” which does the job perfectly, with plain text and HTML e-mails. Since then, my company had another requirement; to copy outgoing e-mails to an archive. I found a product that will do this and it will also add the disclaimer. The product is called Synonym. It is also a Milter that links into sendmail, but unlike the cvgfilter, which is a C program, it has an HTML style configuration file and a start-up and shut-down script. Since it does exactly what I required, I thought this would be an ideal solution. I compiled and installed Synonym and eventually got it to work. However, there are some problems with adding the disclaimer in HTML format.

If I let Synonym add a disclaimer to all e-mail going through the mail server, incoming HTML e-mails have the HTML disclaimer added. If I then create or forward an HTML e-mail from Outlook or Outlook Express the /var/log/maillog says that the outgoing message is TEXT and adds the text disclaimer, whilst converting my e-mail to plain text. If I comment-out the disclaimer in the Synonym config file, the e-mail is sent as intended. The Synonym documentation says that the disclaimer can be either text, HTML or both, depending on the entry in the config file. If the HTML only disclaimer is in the config file, then only the HTML disclaimer will be added. If I do this, the e-mail is once again converted to plain text format and the disclaimer is not added at all.

Has anyone got Synonym to work properly or is there a problem with Synonym itself?