Re: Querying a DB to determine destination mailbox for an email using Procmail

LuKreme <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.mail.procmail
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 27 Oct 2011, at 18:58 , Komal Tagdiwala (ktagdiwa) wrote:

> Requirement: I need to devise a solution where a procmail script can dynamically determine the final destination mailbox by querying a database for a particular keyword to get the corresponding mailbox.
> 
> Approach I have in mind:
> Based on my knowledge of procmail so far, I envision the following steps but wanted some expert opinion on finding the right approach.
> 1. Use a database to maintain a key/value pair type information for a keyword and a corresponding mailbox name. This information may be maintained manually or using a custom application (outside of procmail).
> 2. Write a Perl script which takes an input parameter from procmail (I have not done this before but I believe procmail can call a Perl script and just pass an argument in the call). 

If it is simply a matter of key/value pair, then it is much easier to use grep.

# I think Sean wrote this, essentially.

:0 h
CLEANFROM=|formail -IReply-To: -rtzxTo:

WHITELIST=$HOME/.friends
ISLISTED=`grep -i "^$CLEANFROM " $WHITELIST`
:0
* ISLISTED ?? ^[^ ]+[   ]+\/[^  ]+
$MATCH

.friends
[email protected] Friends
[email protected] Mom
[email protected] Bob
[email protected] Friends

> 3. The Perl script performs the actual query to database for a given keyword to find the corresponding mailbox name.

If you need to query an actual database, then yes you will need an external script to do it.

> 4. The script then returns the mailbox name to the procmail script/recipe that invoked the Perl script.

That won’t work, the procmail recipe has to either wait for success, or assume success. This will be the hangup.

> If yes, are there any conditions that I missed in my approach that I need to be mindful of before beginning research and development for this solution using this approach?

The biggest issue is that your procmail deliveries will come to a complete stop while your query script runs. This might be a critical flaw, a minor annoyance, or of no importance at all.

-- 
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a
little way past them into the impossible.
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