NAME
courierperlfilter - Sample Perl-based mail filter
SYNOPSIS
filterctl [[start] | [stop]] [perlfilter]
DESCRIPTION
This is an example global mail filter that uses an embedded Perl
script. "Embedded" means that the Perl interpreter is loaded once, and
the same Perl code is repeatedly called to accept or reject incoming
messages, one by one. Perl filtering is relatively time consuming
(compared to filtering in C or C++), and excessive delays in mail
filters result in incoming mail being deferred (rejected with a
temporary error code). Therefore the perlfilter wrapper can create
multiple perlfilter processes, so that multiple processes are used to
filter incoming mail.
perlfilter requires Perl 5.004 or higher. The best way to create a Perl
filter is to start with the sample filter,
/usr/lib/courier/perlfilter-example.pl. This filter reject messages
that contain an excessively long Date: header (designed to crash
certain poorly-written mail clients). Use it as a basis for writing
your own filter. You can install your filter in any convenient
location, then initialize the /etc/courier/filters/perlfilter
configuration file, as described below. Run filterctl start perlfilter
to activate filtering (if necessary, run courierfilter start to start
the mail filtering subsystem).
Setting up a Perl script
Most of the ugly details of connecting the Perl script to Courier´s
mail filtering engine is taken care of by the sample
perlfilter-example.pl script. One big no-no: the script MAY NOT change
the current directory. Anything else goes, for the most part. Loading
other modules and classes, pretty much anything else you can do with
Perl, is allowed.
The Perl script, just like any other mail filtering module, receives a
pointer to a data file and one or more control files, each time a
message is submitted to Courier for delivery. The sample script calls
the filterdata() function to process the data file. The data file
contains the actual message. The filtercontrol() function is called to
process each control file. The control file contains recipient and
message metadata. There may be more than one control file for each
message. The example script includes an implementation of filterdata()
that blocks messages with corrupted headers. The example script doesn´t
do anything interesting with filtercontrol().
filterdata() and filtercontrol() must return an empty string if no
serious objections are raised for this message. Any other return string
is interpreted as an SMTP-style error code that is used to reject the
message. Care must be taken that any error messages are formatted
strictly according to the format of SMTP error messages (even though
the message may not actually come in via SMTP).
CREDITS
A lot of the Perl glue code is based on examples from the perlembed
manual page, and other sources.
FILES
perlfilter uses the following configuration files. Changes to the
following files do not take effect until the filter has been stopped
and restarted.
/etc/courier/filters/perlfilter-mode
If this file exists and contains the word "all", perlfilter will
create its socket in /var/lib/courier/allfilters, otherwise the
socket will be created in /var/lib/courier/filters, see
courierfilter(8)[1] for more information.
/etc/courier/filters/perlfilter-numprocs
This file contains a number that sets how many perlfilter processes
are created. The default is 5 processes. There´s always an extra
perlfilter process that´s used to clean up crashed child processes.
/etc/courier/filters/perlfilter
This file MUST exist and it must contain a single line of text with
the filename of the Perl script to load.
/usr/lib/courier/perlfilter-example.pl
This is a sample Perl script of the kind that
/etc/courier/filters/perlfilter points to. Use it as an example of
writing your own Perl filters.
Please exercise good judgment in writing Perl-based filters. They
should be reasonably fast, and do not allocate megabytes of memory.
They should not be very promiscuous in creating global Perl variables,
and should clean up after themselves. The current Perl wrapper does not
destroy the Perl symbol table after each call to the filter script.
However, do not take that for granted. This may change in the future.
SEE ALSO
courierfilter(8)[1].
NOTES
1. courierfilter(8)
[set $man.base.url.for.relative.links]/courierfilter.html