> The shop I work in is in the process of retiring some old host names. We > are working towards shutting down an old mercury mail server and we would > like to, along with redirecting any mail coming into that server, notify > all senders that the host name/addres has changed. > > So, basically, we would like to forward all incoming mail to the correct > new address(we have these aliases already), and would also like to > generate an email to send back to the orginator of the message. > > This email, in the best of all worlds, would have some information on the > hostname change and would also look in our aliases and pull out the > correct email address(based on where it was sent to and the alias that > corresponds to it) so that the user can easily update their address book. > > I figure we would just tack a pointer to a script onto the alias and have > that script do all the work; that way the mail gets forwarded and another > copy goes to the mail processing script. My only problem is I am unsure > of what scripting language I should use (procmail?) and if reading the > alias file will be possible. Anyone know of a pre-built script which will > do this? I can't think of any pre-built script. I suppose you could use "vacation" on all affected accounts, but that wouldn't seperate the properly addressed accounts from the old ones. Piping to a script in /etc/mail/aliases (or wherever) is probably your easiest solution. Just pipe to a custom script in your language of choice (I'd use Perl and Mail::Sendmail) that would gobble up the incoming mail, parse the alias files and whatnot, and send the appropriate reply to the appropriate parties. I think you'd also have to have this script forward the original message to the right place when it was done, but it's been a while since I had to dink with something of this nature. You might run into problems with smrsh, too. (I don't know if smrsh will let you read /etc/mail/aliases, for example), and unless you want to disable that, your *second* best bet is to use a procmail line like: :0 c * ^To.*@oldhost.something.com /tmp/holdingpen And then a cron'd program like the above that would gobble that file up every few minutes, parse out the message senders, prune duplicates and send out notices. In this case, the script *doesn't* have to do the normal delivery (that's what the "c" in the first line is for) There may be an easier or more elegant answer, but I can't think of one at the moment. -- Eric Hillman UNIX Sysadmin/Webmaster City & County Credit Union ehillman at cccu.com