Re: Procmail with faceless account

At 11:04 2013-02-01, Peters, Ron wrote:
>1.       Procmail seems to be typically used or end users to manage 
>their own mail. I haven't really run across any sites discussing it 
>being used in this way. Is this a novel approach or have others gone 
>down this path before?

You can invoke procmail from an alias (i.e. a non-account mail 
identity).  Mailing lists are/were often configured this way.  I have 
mail on a large site that pumps through procmail in this fashion.

>  It seems that with the way most folks use email today (not from a 
> shell), using Procmail in this way may give it more value and 
> exposure than it's had in the past. I know that once folks in my 
> organization started realizing what could be done (since email is 
> so heavily used in many ways), they started finding more and more uses for it.

Sounds rather like they're finding more and more things to ask 
someone else to write for them.

>2.       Because we're using it as an enterprise application that's 
>centrally managed AND there's almost nobody here that 
>understands/uses the CLI in a Linux environment,

See my preceeding comment.  In some circles, this is called "job 
security".  If nobody else wants to learn the environment, and you're 
the one guy who does, seems you're in a good position.

>  I was thinking about some type of web based frontend for managing 
> all our rules. Though you'd still have to understand regular 
> expressions and the scripts that I've written, it would reduce one 
> barrier. Is there anything like this or has anyone thought about 
> it? I looked at the Procmail Webmin/Usermin interface and it sort 
> of works but since I INCLUDE a bunch of rule files, I didn't see 
> how to manage those, only the INCLUDE rules. Thoughts?

I know there has been interest in having such an interface, but as 
the power of procmail is in being able to run external processes and 
chaining rules, etc, setting up a library and UI with which a 
neophyte could compose worthwhile rules without shooting themselves 
in the foot would be a major undertaking.

---
  Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

  Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
  Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.