[Dovecot] dovecot, procmail and deliver

[David Lee]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Gerhard Wiesinger wrote:

> Try my patch from:
> http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2006-July/014656.html
>
> You can use dovecots deliver program with procmail, it also trips the
> from lines. It works well for me since July 2006.
>
> Logging is done through the procmail logging.

Thanks for the reply.  I've taken a look at the patch.

There are two different things going on in this discussion.  These needn't
be either/or but could be both/and.

Your patch is to procmail to improve its functionality.  I recommend you
to try to get it incorporated into procmail by its developers.  It could
be of benefit both to users of dovecot and to users of some non-dovecot
delivery mechanisms.

My proposal is to enhance dovecot LDA to fix what seems to be a
deficiency, especially when compared to UW-IMAP, both when driven from
procmail and also probably when driven from some other, non-procmail,
mechanisms.

(Our thoughts may address similar issues. They overlap, but by addressing
both of them (possibly independently) with the respective project
maintainers, both projects benefit.)

Already procmail, as is, (no patch necessary) works well with UW-IMAP's
"dmail" delivery program.  Email is delivered via UW-IMAP/dmail into the
INBOX or folder. There are no problems with duplicated "From ".  There is
syslog (system-level, rather than user-level) logging to complete the
system-level logging that was done as the email arrived.

But dovecot's LDA seems not to give this final, clean, completion.  My
suggestion is to provide it, so that dovecot's LDA can come up to the
functional level of UW-IMAP's "dmail".

To complete this, I think (but I'm new to dovecot!) all we need to adjust
in "deliver" is:

1. ensure that exactly one "From " line is present (add if necessary;
don't add if already present);

2. have the ability (option?) for it to write a "syslog" entry.


I'd be happy to try to concoct a dovecot patch for the above if folk here
think the idea is sound.

-- 

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