Request for assistance

[jabr at abreau.net (John Abreau)]

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mike ledoux <mwl+blu at alumni.unh.edu> writes:

> On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 10:41:16PM -0500, John Abreau wrote:
[snip]
> >
> > Once you've got that working, you'd change that entry in your
> > muttrc file from
> >
> >     sendmail -oi -oem -t
> >
> > to
> >
> >     ssh shell.example.com nc localhost 25
> 
> I don't think that will work; mutt is simply going to send the message
> through the pipe, and the remote SMTP daemon isn't going to know
> what to do with it, since mutt didn't write a SMTP envelope.  Also,
> I don't think you really want the '-t' on your sendmail command--mutt
> lists the recipients as additional arguments to the sendmail command,
> so it isn't necessary to have sendmail parse the message headers to find
> that information.

I took the "sendmail -oi -oem -t" from mark_glassberg's message, as 
I don't use mutt myself. I assumed he was quoting it directly from 
his .muttrc file. 

I use exmh myself, and I've been using the above technique successfully. 
exmh sits on top of nmh, and I added the line 

    sendmail:       /home/jabr/bin/mysendmail

to my /etc/nmh/mts.conf file and created the "mysendmail" script, 
which is simply 

    ssh asgard '/usr/bin/nc localhost 25' 

I probably didn't actually need the quotes or the absolute path to 
netcat, but if it ain't broke...

Anyway, I just prepended "tee /tmp/MESSAGE |" to the ssh invokation 
to examine what actually gets sent, and it turns out exmh (or nmh, 
more likely) actually wraps the message in an SMTP envelope before 
passing it to my script. If mutt doesn't do that, then you'd just 
write your own wrapper script. I'd start with a dummy script to test 
with, so I could examine what mutt passes to it on the command line, 
in the environment, and through its stdin. A few test messages to 
generate a good data sample, then write a script to chew on the 
relevant bits and crap out a proper envelope to pass over the 
ssh tunnel. 


- --
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0xD5C7B5D9
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