Re: flexfax: e-mail to fax: controlling access

[Nico Garcia <raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu>]

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On 21 Apr 1998, Eloy A. Paris wrote:

> Hi again Nico,
> 
> Nico Garcia <raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu> wrote:
> 
> : What? (Scratch head?) No. The "mailer" is either the Mail User Agent,
> : such as pine or Netscape, that handles your personal mail, or the Mail
> : Transport Agent, that actually bounces mail around between various
> : people. In you case, the MTA is sendmail with procmail added.
> 
> Well, I guess we are talking about different things. The mailer I'm
> talking about is not the MUA, is the Mail Delivery Agent.
> 
> Sendmail can have different mailers (MDA's) defined in the sendmail.cf
> configuration file. Some examples are the "local" mailer, the "uucp"
> mailer, etc. The "local" mailer can be the program called "deliver" or
> it can be "procmail".

Ahh. This is a Mail Transport Agent, MTA. I was confused when you said
"fax" was the mailer, rather than saying "faxmail" was the mailer.

> The way I configured my e-mail to fax gateway, I created a new mailer
> in sendmail called "fax". This mailer is setup to call "faxmail" with
> the appropiate parameters when a messages is sent to
> whatever@faxnumber.fax.

Ohhhhh! I see. Then in this case, yes, "fax" is also the name of an MTA.

> : Set up procmail for the *fax* user, and have procmail handle shipping off the
> : fax jobs, I think.
> 
> OK, I think this is a different approach. In order for this to work
> users must send mails to something like fax@my.domain. In this case,
> sendmail will user the "local" mailer which could be procmail (if it
> isn't, a .forward file could pass the message to procmail for
> processing).

Yes. Procmail is, IMHO, a more tested MTA and relatively easy to configure
for filtering sources of faxes appropriately. Mind you, I haven't done
this here, only on my home box, and I ripped it out later....

> : Bingo. Have procmail call faxmail.
> 
> Actually, it would be the other way: a script that calls both procmail
> and later faxmail (this is because sendmail won't ever call procmail,
> unless I change the "fax" mailer deifinition).

Why not just use procmail to pipe the messages through faxmail? This
seems an easy thing to do, and leaves the system with only one special
configuration file, under procmail. Leaves it more portable, I think.

			Nico Garcia
			Senior Engineer, CIRL 
			Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
			raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu

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