ActiveState announced today a partnership with Sendmail to
embed Perl into the Sendmail Internet Mail Platform API.
Can someone explain to me what that means? :)
Paging Sarathy... Please pick up the Camel Phone
chip on 2000-04-12T00:47:49
We need Sarathy to explain.
But I do know that Perl is integrated into Usenet News transports so as to more easily and efficiently filter spam and other undesirable content.
Mail spam filters in Perl would be marvelous. And maybe we could rewrite addresses with regexes instead of those truly weird things that Sendmail calls ``configuration files''.
Re:Paging Sarathy... Please pick up the Camel Phon
gsar on 2000-04-19T23:06:15
sendmail provides (in v8.10.0) an API for filtering messages, based on almost any kind of information involved in an SMTP transaction. The Perl "plugin" is essentially a way to make the power of this API accessible to the mail admin.
Spam control would be one of the big potential uses. Others include: volume accouting (useful for ISPs to "ration" services, or catch spammers), mail archiving (useful for complying with regulations that call for all email to be archived, or misuseful for playing "big brother"
:), custom routing (handy for redirecting messages to people based on time-of-day), etc. Some of these things are possible to do with procmail or clever use of
/etc/aliases, but not generally efficient. Filters also give you the ability to intercede at the level of the SMTP transaction, whereas procmail can only influence how the local delivery happens.
The initial release will only work with inbound messages. sendmail doesn't support outbound message filters just yet.
Finally, in case it wasn't obvious, note that it isn't an open source project, but I won't discount that eventual possibility.
:-)
Sarathy
A potential use...
Simon on 2000-04-20T12:27:47
rand(++$i)&&($a=$_) while $_=getpwent;
$mail->rewrite("To:",$a);
Incidentally, doesn't exim have an embedded interpreter? I seem to recall Malcolm plugged one in...
