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On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 02:28:50PM -0600, dovecot@segel.com wrote:
Hi,
Here's the scenario.
I want to set up a mailbox so that when mail sent to the address is piped to a processing application, instead of going to a mailbox.
Conceptually, when a mail arrives there are two processes involved: the mail transfer agent (MTA) and the mail delivery agent (MDA). The mail transfer agent takes the mail from "the net" (typically from another MTA) and decides whether the mail has to be delivered locally (then it passes it on to the MDA) or remotely (then it passes it on to another MTA).
Note that Dovecot doesn't enter this picture at all (yet). Its primary job is serving up mail to end-users when it has already been delivered.
All that said, most MTAs (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail, Qmail, you name it) bring along with them delivery functions (can fill in the role of MDAs). The dovecot distribution brings along with it a delivery agent (deliver) which you can configure to play many tricks on delivery via a language designed explicitly for that (called Sieve), and there are quite powerful "third party" delivery agents (e.g. procmail).
So, to sum up your best bet would be:
if the requirements are simple, like "pipe all mail going to this user through this program", do as Justin said and tell your mail transfer agent to do that. To be able to give you any hints, I should at least know the beast by name ;-)
if the task is more complex (e.g. depending on other headers, time of day, you name it), then just tell the MTA to push it to the MDA (most come preconfigured to do that anyway, if circumstances are right) and tweak the MDA configuration to achieve that.
Hope that helps. Things can be a bit confusing at the beginning.
Regards
- -- tomás
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