my other FREQ of the day

[S Mohan]

Dear Julian:

Would it be possible to scan the rules file for any header name and
match like procmail instead of just From and To. This would make the
rule set mighty powerful.

Mohan

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
Behalf Of Julian Field
Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2003 4:58 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: my other FREQ of the day


At 11:10 16/02/2003, you wrote:
>On Sunday, Feb 16, 2003, at 01:58 US/Pacific, Julian Field wrote:
>>At 23:38 15/02/2003, you wrote:
>>>3) somewhat related to #1 is that you cannot reject messages based
>>>upon results.  You can try to bounce them, after the fact, but that
>>>isn't reliable (because you cannot trust the return addresses).  I'd
>>>rather reject them outright.
>>
>>That's your MTA's job.
>
>Yes, it should be the MTA's job, but the decision about what to reject
>depends upon (or, in an ideal world, would involve) the results of what

>Mailscanner has found.  Sort of a chicken and the egg thing --
>mailscanner wont make a decision until after the MTA has accepted the
>message, but if mailscanner finds something bad, then the MTA might
>want to reject the message ... except that it already accepted it.

As you cannot trust the return addresses, the only thing you could do
(other than deliver it, obviously) is to discard the message. And you
don't want to do that until all the spam+virus tests have been done. So
you would achieve the same effect by setting the outgoing queue dir
using a custom function. This would do whatever checks it wanted to on
the message, and then possibly produce an outgoing queue dir that is
"special". This "special" directory would have no "queue runner"
process, but instead a little cron job that just deletes everything in
the directory every hour or so.

This would have the effect of throwing away the messages if they meet
various criteria of your choosing, which I think is what you are trying
to achieve. It would only take a few minutes to set up. Take a look in
CustomConfig.pm for example Custom Functions, and all the properties of
a message are listed at the start of Message.pm. If you know what you
want to do, and are prepared to pay me for my time, I'll write it for
you if you can't do it yourself.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support