Re: Writing a script for a mailserver

[elwarren]

You could use the ImagePwd module (available on CPAN) to generate the password image for you.

Checkout the procmail website. They have links right off the frontpage to their faqs and tips and tricks, which have recipes for similar ideas you want to implement. There are recipes there for responding only to the first email as well as maintaining a killfile and even password reply authentication systems.

Everyone here has already expressed their concerns about a project like this, so I won't repeat them. Looking at the procmail page it occurred to me that people that maintain subscriber-only mailling lists have already dealt with this problem. You sign up for a mailing list, the ask you to verify your address somehow, and after that only subscribers are allowed to post to the mailling list.

Along the same lines, how will you handle notifications and mailling-list type messages that don't have humans behind them to reply? I suppose you could add them to your subscription list by hand...

How will you know that the address that's attempting to sign up isn't somebody else's address, thus making you spam somebody else that doesn't want it?

What will you do with messages from people that haven't authenticated yet? Send them right to /dev/null? I'm sure half of my family members "just wouldn't get it." and all of my friends would refuse to sign up, cuz that's what your buddies are for :-)

I'd make a simple procmail filter that moves all of your unauthenticated mail into a junk folder, leaving only the good messages in your inbox. Procmail can do this by password on subject line or by a list of valid users. Then you could empty that folder on a weekly or monthly basis. Your only perl portion would be generating the password image, you'd never see anything you didn't want, and you could recover a message you may be expecting or let it die a silent death.

Good luck.