Stat email system

Stat uses Sendmail with relaying filters and Procmail for local delivery to users' home directories. The current sendmail.cf is lightly hand-edited, after being compiled with m4. Some of the Procmail magic is in /usr/local/etc/procmailrc but not the local directory mail delivery.

Promail is configured to work around what used to be a fairly unstable system by making a backup copy of all incoming mail, and delivering mail to an alternate location if ~person/ was unavailable. The backup copies live in /spool/mail.backup/person.backup, for mail since the most recent Sunday morning. The previous Sunday-to-Sunday backup is gzipped in the same directory. Backup rotation is handled by the /usr/local/etc/cron.admin/cleanspool script. Backup, alternate delivery and the script are all on mailhost.

The alternate mail delivery makes a file /spool/mail.alt/person which is flushed by /usr/local/etc/flushmail the next time mail arrives after the user's directory becomes available again. The flushed mail becomes /spool/mail.alt/person.flush and should be removed automatically afterwards.

After the ILOVEYOU Visual Basic Script (.vbs) virus hit campus 2000-05-04, a section was added to /usr/local/etc/procmailrc which bounces email with certain attachments as undeliverable. This script addition was lifted from CLASNET's system procmailrc file.

There are a couple of web archives from mailing lists which are handled by MHonArc. The archives are updated every five minutes from a crontab entry on mailhost. If the usage picks up, moving to a 15-minute cycle will become appropriate (or moving the mail/archiving off the current server).

Information	Academic Programs	Personnel
Departmental Units	Department Resources	Links

Last modified: Wed Dec 6 15:13:10 EST 2000