scripts.mit.edu

MIT SIPB Script Services for Athena

MIT SIPB Mail Script Service

The mail script service uses procmail allows people to set up scripts to process e-mail using an Athena account. The mail script service is designed and maintained with less of a focus on reliability than the web script service, and should not be used to run applications that cannot tolerate downtime or occasional lost messages.

Your mail scripts will automatically process mail sent to

YOUR_LOCKER_NAME@scripts.mit.edu or
YOUR_LOCKER_NAME+ANY_TAG@scripts.mit.edu or
ANY_TAG@YOUR_LOCKER_NAME.scripts.mit.edu

If you have a non-MIT hostname served by scripts.mit.edu, your mail scripts will also process mail sent to

ANY_TAG@YOUR_DOMAIN.com

You can access the tag on a message from your procmailrc file by parsing the X-Original-To header or as the $1 variable.

To sign up for the service:

athena% add scripts
athena% signup-mail

(If you are confused about how to run the above commands on Athena, e-mail scripts@mit.edu for assistance. You must have an Athena account and understand the MITnet rules of use in order to use the service.)

This signup process will create a mail_scripts directory. Learn about procmail and modify your ~/mail_scripts/procmailrc file to do whatever mail processing you desire. You may want to look at our sample files in /mit/jbarnold/mail_scripts. If your scripts need to write data, be sure to give daemon.scripts the necessary access in AFS.

Finally, add yourself to the scripts-announce mailing list if you would like to receive announcements of major service changes and outages. This list receives less than one e-mail per month on average.

For more information, see our list of Frequently Asked Questions.

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These pages may be reused under either the GFDL 1.2 or CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Questions? Contact scripts@mit.edu.

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