Electric Postcard Office Operating Manual
Sending and Storing Messages
You are now running a mail service, as well as a postcard store. You
are responsible for:
When someone sends a postcard, several things happen.
- A claim number is generated
- The message is stored
- A notification is sent
The Postcard Office uses sendmail to send the notification to the
recipient. If your system does not have sendmail, or it is not in
/usr/lib/sendmail you must edit the script file
postPostCard.perl to configure it to your system.
Claim numbers are in the form [recipient's name].[random number]
The claim number is also the file name under which the message is
stored.
The messages are kept in subdirectories of $HoldingDir.
The subdirectories are based on the digits in the random number part
of the claim number.
If you have 3 levels, then a card whose claim number is JohnDoe.1398743 will
be placed in
$HoldingDir/7/4/3/JohnDoe.1398743
A notation is made in the log file
(specified in the $LogFile variable) whenever a message is claimed.
This is useful for knowing when to discard old messages - if a card is
still getting claims it should not be discarded, even though it was
sent long ago. People do send cards to mailing lists and the claims
often trickle in slowly.
The users' messages are files which are owned by whoever is running
the server. Postcard servers should be run as
nobody or some other very secure user. If you cannot
be sure that other users on your system cannot and will not read the
postcard messages, you should not run the postcard server!
Return to Electric Postcard Operations: Introduction
Last modified: Mon Apr 8 17:52:43 1996