OT Multiple recipient email - I have a solution that seems to work for me

[David Fletcher]

On Thursday 21 Jan 2010, David Fletcher wrote:
> My email server went down a couple of weeks ago, so now I'm trying to get it 
> configured again.
> 
> It's just about working, but there's a little problem that I never managed 
to 
> find before.
> 
> The server is configured firstly as an outgoing mail relay using postfix 
with 
> sasl to work as an authenticated smtp client. This appears to be working 
just 
> fine.
> 
> At my email provider One and One, there is a mail box used to collect mail 
for 
> multiple people, with forwards set up to direct mail for john at example.com, 
> mary at example.com etc. to the same box.
> 
> This mail box is emptied by fetchmail running as a cron job, which passes 
> messages to procmail for filtering and sorting.
> 
> Normally, this works.
> 
> AFAICT my problem is, if a single message is sent to multiple recipients 
> @example.com, it goes into the One and One mail collection box as a single 
> message with multiple recipients, gets collected by fetchmail as a single 
> message, then gets dropped by procmail into the first matching local mail 
box 
> it finds, so that only one of the recipients actually receives the message.
> 
> I can log into the One and One mail box with web mail, and sure enough it 
> shows a single message with multiple recipients.
> 
> Is it possible to somehow tell fetchmail to make multiple copies of these 
> messages before passing them on to procmail?

I've had "interesting times" the last couple of days, and learnt stuff about 
email that I didn't know before, I think.

Presumably with what I will call a "proper" system with a fixed IP address and 
an MX record to squirt email directly into the receiving system, sendmail or 
postfix takes care of everything using an alias list. I don't have that 
luxury at present, so I've formulated a workaround using fetchmail and 
procmail that seems to be working for me. I'm sure the result is a little 
ugly, but here is the basic format of what I've done to try to make sure 
email gets delivered to everybody mentioned in the headers.

I have added to it the special cases that we have, filters to eliminate 
certain rubbish I'm not interested in, etc.

BCC: is still a mystery to me - it appears to fail to work with this rc file. 
I may spend a little more time investigating it.

If anything is horribly wrong, someone please tell me.

MAILDIR=/var/mail
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/mbox

:0
* ^To.*person-1 at example.com\
 |^cc.*person-1 at example.com
{
# This and all the similar carbon copies
# are here to attempt to deal with the
# situation of multiple recipients of a
# message to this domain.
# This of course causes a carbon copy
# to drop off the end of the file, so
# I've added a /dev/null at the bottom
# to hopefully dump these.
 :0 c:
 av
}

:0
* ^To.*person-2 at example.com\
 |^cc.*person-2 at example.com
{
 :0 c:
 dave
}

:0
* ^To.*person-3 at example.com\
 |^cc.*person-3 at example.com
{
 :0 c:
 elaine
}

:0
* ^To.*person-4 at example.com\
 |^cc.*person-4 at example.com
{
 :0 c:
 jf
}



:0
* ^To.*person-1 at example.com\
 |^To.*person-2 at example.com\
 |^To.*person-3 at example.com\
 |^To.*person-4 at example.com\
 |^cc.*person-1 at example.com\
 |^cc.*person-2 at example.com\
 |^cc.*person-3 at example.com\
 |^cc.*person-4 at example.com
{
 :0
 /dev/null
}

# Anything else, deliver to an administrator to
# make sure problems get looked at
:0:
* .*
mailneedsattention

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