Sendmail configuration

[Bob Bell]

Sorry for the delayed reply.  Thanks to everyone for their replies.
I knew I could count on this list for some helpful advice, especially
from the sysadmins on the list.  It's quite a useful resource we have
here.

On Sun, Jun 15, 2003 at 02:24:45AM -0400, Derek Martin <gnhlug at sophic.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 14, 2003 at 09:27:42PM -0400, Bob Bell wrote:
> > Can anyone point me to information on the use of "+" in address with
> > sendmail (as in "bbell+extrainfo at domain.com")?  I don't know what it's
> > called, so it's rather hard to google for.  Or perhaps someone has
> > a ready-made solution to my problem?
> 
> I'm still not entirely sure I understand what problem you are trying
> to solve, so I don't know about any ready-made solution.  But the
> feature is generally referred to as "+detail" or "plus detail" in the
> sendmail docs.  There are several places where mention of this is made
> here:
> 
>   http://www.sendmail.org/m4/features.html
> 
> I can't say whether they'll be helpful or not...  But if not, you can
> prolly find others.

    This looks really helpful.  As I mentioned, I'm all for R-ing TFM,
I just needed to know what to look for.  There looks to be some good
information here to go over.

> > Basically, I want to track the "envelope" destination of the message.
> 
> Track how?  If all you want to do is count messages, it seems to me
> that the easiest way to do that is to parse the syslog logs, assuming
> you have read access to them.  Sendmail logs the envelope addresses of
> every message to the (surprise!) mail facility by default, which
> generally gets sent to something similar to /var/log/mail.log on most
> Unix systems.  If you have trouble finding the mail logs, have a look
> at /etc/syslog.conf to see where they go.
> 
> Another way would be to parse the Received: headers in the messages
> themselves, looking for the "for" line, as in this example:
> 
>   Received: from rogue.codemeta.com (IDENT:ggD1eR6UdHwViNSGBJZNA5zBkRXS5zUq at rogue.codemeta.com [199.125.75.14])
>         by thoth.sophic.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h5F1UWo09869
>         for <gnhlug at sophic.org>; Sat, 14 Jun 2003 21:30:33 -0400
> 
> Be aware that for either of these methods, the envelope address can
> change in the course of message transit, due to aliasing, routing,
> etc.  Each (E)SMTP connection has its own envelope, so the final
> envelope address may not be the original envelope address, and all of
> those addresses might be completely different from the address in the
> message's To: header.

    Basically, I was looking to create an "[X-]Envelope-To" header.
I've got some (spam) messages being dropped into a unexpected mailbox --
that is, they go to foo at domain.com when the "To" header says
bar at domain.com.  I wanted to verify that the envelope on a message was
really "foo".  The mail logs may actually help me do that, although
having "Envelope-To" may be useful long term, so I'll look at both
approaches.  Thanks.

-- 
Bob Bell <bbell at hp.com>
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