Collecting Messages

Collecting Messages

To retrieve a Mail-message I need a notification message in my old Email-Inbox. The only thing to do is sending a reply to that message.

The notification is constructed in a way, that the Subject: field holds the complete path to the original message, and the From: field is im2000-cl (collect), with the domain beeing the originating server (Qmail-controls "me").

When the user replies to the message a new Subject: field is constructed by the Mua, which is more or less " Re: old-subject". The collect function strips of the Re: part, to re-create the message identifier, in fact any "*: " of the subject is stripped of, for allowing "Aw: " replies from german speaking Mua's, etc. This reply message is a message collect request. In a final version of im2000 it carries cryptografic information which autentifies the requester.

im2000-cl on the originating server than extracts the filename requested, and sends the file back to the sender of the message collect request.

~im2000/.qmail-cl

# 1) do autentication things

# 2) find out which message was requested

# | MESS=$(/usr/local/bin/822field) ; \

# 3) send it to the final recipient identifier

# cat ${MESS##*: } \

# | /var/qmail/bin/forward $SENDER

| MESS=$(/usr/local/bin/822field) ; \

cat ${MESS##*: } \

| /var/qmail/bin/forward $SENDER

Notes:

im2000-cl can be made into a query interface, where details like checksums, keys, Subject, etc. can be retrieved without retrieving the whole message.
On the other hand, this can also be done independently with a im2000-qr interface.
You'd have noticed, that we do not delete the message. Normally this will not be done. Various scenarios: Mailing lists, messages with multiple recipients, Checking mail on the road, but deleting it after retrieval at home, etc.
You'd have noticed too, that we do neither register the message collect request, neither log it (although Qmail does this for us in a certain way). This is a bug: fix it!

Jorge.Lehner@gmx.net

Collecting Messages