10. Using Anubis to Process Incoming Mail

Historically Anubis was designed to process outgoing mail. Support for processing incoming mail was added in version 4.1.

To process incoming mail, Anubis must be started as mail delivery agent from your MTA configuration file. The invocation line must contain ‘--mode=mda’ option, that tells Anubis to act in mail delivery mode. In this mode, Anubis receives the message from standard input, processes it using configuration file sections named incoming-mail-rule and finally calls local mailer to actually deliver the modified message. The local mailer must be given using ‘--local-mta’ option.

Let's summarize the special features of mail delivery mode :

The mode is triggered by ‘--mode=mda’ in the command line. It cannot be specified in configuration file.
Anubis uses local mailer to actually deliver messages. The invocation line of the local mailer must be given via ‘--local-mta’ command line option. The settings of ‘local-mta’ (see section Basic Settings is ignored.
The local mailer invocation line may contain meta-variables %sender and %recipient, which will be replaced by the actual sender and recipient email addresses before starting the mailer.
Special option ‘--from’ may be used in Anubis command line. This option sets sender email address (see %sender meta variable above). It implies ‘--mode=mda’. If the option is not given, GNU Anubis will deduce sender address from UNIX ‘From ’ header or, if it is not present, from the value of From SMTP header.
In MDA mode, Anubis takes names of the recipients from the command line.
Anubis uses a separate rule section for processing incoming mails. The default section name is ‘INCOMING’. It may be overridden in system configuration file using ‘incoming-mail-rule’ (see section Basic Settings).

Following discussion explains how to configure Anubis in MDA mode with different mail transport agents.

Sendmail

If you use mc file to generate ‘sendmail.cf’, use LOCAL_MAILER_PATH and LOCAL_MAILER_ARGS as shown in the following example:

define(`LOCAL_MAILER_PATH', `/usr/local/sbin/anubis')
define(`LOCAL_MAILER_ARGS',
       `mail --mode=mda -l '/libexec/mail.local -f %sender %recipient')

If you prefer to directly edit ‘sendmail.cf’, use M macro to declare Anubis as a local mailer. Following example illustrates this:

Mlocal, P=/usr/local/sbin/anubis,
        F=lsDFMAw5:/|@qSPfhn9,
        S=EnvFromL/HdrFromL, R=EnvToL/HdrToL,
        T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
        A=mail --mode=mda -l '/libexec/mail.local -f %sender %recipient' $u

Exim

With exim, you will need to declare appropriate transport and director in ‘exim.conf’:

# transport
mail_local_pipe:
  driver = pipe
  command = /usr/local/sbin/anubis --mode=mda \
             -l '/libexec/mail.local -f %sender %recipient' $local_part
  return_path_add
  delivery_date_add
  envelope_to_add

# director
mail_local:
  driver = localuser
  transport = mail_local_pipe

[ << ]

[ >> ]

[Top]

[Contents]

[Index]

[ ? ]

This document was generated by Sergey Poznyakoff on November, 5 2007 using texi2html 1.78.