[OT] Debian mailinglists [was: RE: Debian or Ubuntu?]

[Florian Diesch]

Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:

> Mario Vukelic wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 15:32 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>
>> Or maybe 
>> you make it look much simpler than it is by conflating nearly everything
>> into "text". 
>
> Agreed.  The point being that those other options _are_ simplistic.
>
>> May I offer procmailrc as an example for something that 
>> would probably be impossible to implement with a GUI configurator that
>> should also check that the file really does what the user intended:
>> http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=5&topic=procmailrc
>
> Well, I'm not going to write the config tool right now (or probably ever - I
> never liked procmail - though I was working on one for maildrop), but start
> at the beginning - sooner or later every recipe has to deliver mail to a
> file, pipe or program, or to another user.  It's simple to check that the
> file/pipe/program exists.  

Only if you are working ion the mail server where the mails are
delivered. Usually you are not.

> Validating an email address is harder - do you
> simply check that the format is good, or actually test SMTP?  Neither one
> is impossible, though. 

But it's frustrating to see how man programs fail when doing syntax
checks on email addresses.

Testing by SMTP doesn't give you much as if an address is accepted by
some server that doesn't necessarily  mean it gets delivered. Maybe
you get a bounce message a few minutes (or hours or days) later.


>  Now, I can conceive of a situation where I might
> actually forward to an invalid SMTP address intentionally (expecting the
> address to be created shortly) but then it's a matter of what procmail
> would do with such an address when actually running - if procmail will
> retry, it's just a warning, if procmail would drop it, it's an error.

procmail just hands to mail to your MTA to send it, it doesn'r know
anything about SMTP itself.


>> It's not so much about valid key=value pairs, it is about legitimate
>> combinations of values.
>
> The "If A then B" conditions.  In your example, procmail already checks
> those, so why can't a config tool for procmailrc do the same?

A bit more advanced procmail recipes usually contain some amount of
shell code (that may contain inlined code for other interpreters). How
will your GUI handle this?


   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>
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