[Dovecot] Dovecot aspects of fighting spam

[Tom Hendrikx]

On 02/06/10 14:59, Phil Howard wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 02:39, Rainer Frey <rainer.frey at inxmail.de> wrote:
>> On Tuesday 01 June 2010 17:01:16 Phil Howard wrote:
> 
>>> I cannot determine how deliver with an empty string give to -m would
>>> behave.
>>
>> This is just what I mean: the behavior of deliver -m has absolutely nothing to
>> do with fighting spam. It is the same whether you want to use it for spam-
>> tagged mails or any other reason. Therefore you'll not find the description in
>> thedovecot wiki bysearching for "fighting spam". You'll find it by searching
>> for "deliver" (or LDA).
> 
> I found the man page (like) document for deliver just fine.  I did not
> limit my search to just the "spam" keyword.  I'm guessing that you are
> assuming I never found this document:
> 
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA
> 
> But now that you know I have read it (and read it long before the
> previous post), re-read what I said.  You should conclude that I am
> unable to determine fully what -m does from this.  It does not
> describe the behavior if the value given is a null string.  This is a
> concern because in master.cf for Postfix, there is no means to
> dynamically provide or omit the -m option.  You can give it a value
> from a variable.  But it may be necessary to give an empty string
> value in order to not deliver to a specific folder, and I want to know
> if that will get the mail into the INBOX.
> 

Did you even try to set this up in your test environment (you have one,
don't you?) to explore your own capabilities in finding out the
behaviour of this edge case? It sounds trivial to do, but you cannot
expect other list members to test this for you.

When you change your attitude a bit more towards this direction, you
could even add some valuable input to dovecot by suggesting a man page
enhancement describing the behaviour of deliver when hitting an empty
string as argument to -m (or at least fill the gap when someone else has
the same question and tries google for it). Your latest posts to dovecot
(and postfix) mailing lists seem to be only highly speculative and have
a lot of lengthy arguing, and not much hands-on.

A small example describing a more pro-active attitude:
----------------
<phil> Hi list! I need to put spam in a specific folder and want to use
'deliver -m' for this. However, when I set up deliver like this in
postfix <config excerpt omitted>, I get the following results that I did
not expect when the argument for '-m' was a null string: <log excerpt
omitted>.

<list> Hi phil, could you try <suggestion>?. Also, when you do this
<config omitted>, you'll most likely get what you want.

<phil> That works great, thanks guys. I'll add you suggestion to the
dovecot wiki for future reference.
---------------

End of rant mode, I'll switch back to ignore now.


To conclude: I think saw some list posting a while ago that contained an
example of postfix master.cf using a shell-like
${some_arg:-default_string} expansion syntax. I'm sorry to see that I
cannot find it right now. This syntax, or a 3-line wrapper script around
deliver containing it, would solve your issue.

However I still think that you'd be better off checking whether deliver
will already handle your issue nicely (albeit in an undocumented way).


--
Regards,
	Tom