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3.12.8 Mailing list implementation

This subsection explains how to implement mailing lists in mda using the ‘prog’ mailbox scheme.

Delivery to the ‘prog’ mailbox results in invoking the specified command with the given arguments and passing the message to its standard input. There are two ways to specify a ‘prog’ mailbox:

prog://program?args

Here, program is the absolute pathname of the program binary, and args are its arguments, separated by ‘&’ signs.

|program args

In this notation, args are command line arguments separated by white space.

In both cases, args do not include argv[0].

The ‘prog’ mailbox can be used to implement mailing lists.

For example, suppose that the mda configuration contains: 

auth {
  authorization (sql, system);
  authentication (generic, system);
}

sql {
  interface mysql;
  db mail;
  getpwnam "SELECT user as name, mailbox, "
           "'x' as passwd, 500 as uid, 2 as gid, "
           "'/nonexistent' as dir, '/sbin/nologin' as shell "
           "FROM userdb "
           "WHERE user='${user}'";
}

Then, the following entries in the ‘userdb’ table implement the mailman@yourdomain mailing list: 

mysql> select * from userdb;
+---------------------+---------------------------------------+
| user                | mailbox                               |
+---------------------+---------------------------------------+
| mailman             | |/usr/bin/mailman post mailman        |
| mailman-admin       | |/usr/bin/mailman admin mailman       |
| mailman-bounces     | |/usr/bin/mailman bounces mailman     |
| mailman-confirm     | |/usr/bin/mailman confirm mailman     |
| mailman-join        | |/usr/bin/mailman join mailman        |
| mailman-leave       | |/usr/bin/mailman leave mailman       |
| mailman-owner       | |/usr/bin/mailman owner mailman       |
| mailman-request     | |/usr/bin/mailman request mailman     |
| mailman-subscribe   | |/usr/bin/mailman subscribe mailman   |
| mailman-unsubscribe | |/usr/bin/mailman unsubscribe mailman |
+---------------------+---------------------------------------+

GNU Mailutils Manual (split by node):   Section:   Chapter:FastBack: Programs   Up: mda   FastForward: Libraries   Contents: Table of ContentsIndex: Function Index

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