Procmail and extracting attachments

[Holly J. Sommer]

Greetings. I've RFTM'ed enough to get half of a coordinated pair of
scripts
to work. What the two scripts are to do is this:

Localhost:
regularly mail off an updating jpg to a remote account (code below)
Remote host:
upon receipt of the email, extract the attached jpg to a specific
directory

Obviously, sendmail is used for the first (called through a perl
script), and from
what I can gather, I should use procmail for the second, but I'm
completely
unfamiliar with procmail. I've done a pretty good amount of searching on

DejaNews and the web, and the closest I can find in articles addressing
this
is in dealing with stripping out MIME content which isn't text/plain,
before
passing it on to a listserv.

If anyone can point me towards, or provide me with a recipe for
extracting
and moving the attachment to a pre-defined directory, I'd appreciate it
:)
The remote machine is running Linux, fwiw.

Thanks!

-Holly

-->Local mailing script <--
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Mailjpg, by Holly Sommer (c) 1998
# Mimencodes a file, and sends it to a recipient
#
# Handy for firewalls that don't allow ftp PUT or passive ftp
connections

$date = `date`;
$boundarydate = $date;
$boundarydate =~ s/(\s+)/_/g;
$encodedpic = `mimencode -b testpic.jpg`;
open (MAIL, "| /usr/sbin/sendmail -t") || die "Can't open sendmail!\n";
print MAIL<<"END1";
To: remoteaccount\@some.net
From: updater\@another.net (Images)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type:
multipart/mixed;boundary="============_-$boundarydate==_============"

--============_-$boundarydate==_============
Content-Type: IMAGE/jpeg; name="new.jpg"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: BASE64
Content-Description: Updated jpeg

END1
print MAIL $encodedpic;
print MAIL "\n--============_-$boundarydate==_============--\n\n";
close (MAIL);

<--Local mailing script -->

--
"Brevity is the soul of wit, and the essence of lingerie."
-George Will, commencement address to Washington University 15.5.98

[Holly J. Sommer]

[Ken J. Wright]

Holly,

Here are some simple sample files for you to get started. I'm not an
expert. Just did some "follow the leader" to get what I needed ;-)

This is the .procmailrc file in user's home directory. getxls is just a
shell script that shuffles some files, as metamail will place files in
the /tmp directory.
----------------------------------------------------------
# procmail filter to extract excel spreadsheet
:0
*^To:.*user@domain
|/usr/bin/metamail -r -x -q -w; /var/local/excel/getxls
----------------------------------------------------------

This is the .forward file in the user's home directory
----------------------------------------------------------
"|IFS=' '&&exec /usr/bin/procmail||exit 75"
----------------------------------------------------------

metamail does the work of extracting the attachment. Read the man page &
play a bit & you should get the idea. Also the 'aliases' section of the
sendmail man page helps with some of the .forward syntax. The procmail
man pages give samples

Cheers!

Ken

[Holly Sommer]

Holly J. Sommer wrote:

> Greetings. I've RFTM'ed enough to get half of a coordinated pair of
> scripts to work. What the two scripts are to do is this:
>
> Localhost:
> regularly mail off an updating jpg to a remote account (code below)
> Remote host:
> upon receipt of the email, extract the attached jpg to a specific
> directory

Well, more research turned up the answer on my own, and since nobody has
nibbled here, I figured I may as well post the answer.

In short, procmail *itself* wouldn't do the extraction. Rather, I set it
up to make a decision about whether the incoming mail is one which
requires extraction (grepping on a specific line, like say, Subject:, if
you know the subject line ahead of time, for a match) and then pipes it
to an external script, to run the extraction process.

In my particular case, I set up the external script to read through the
in-bound mail line by line until hit hits the Content-type: headers of
the attachment, and then it stores the base64-encoded into a local
array, and when finished (ie: reaches the closing MIME boundary tag) is
feeds the array to mimencode -u )

Pretty nifty set of automation :) Anyone interested in the exact details
can email me.

-Holly