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This chapter contains a full description of the contents of Exim filter files.
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Apart from leading white space, the first text in an Exim filter file must be
# Exim filter |
This is what distinguishes it from a conventional ‘.forward’ file or a Sieve
filter file. If the file does not have this initial line (or the equivalent for
a Sieve filter), it is treated as a conventional ‘.forward’ file, both when
delivering mail and when using the -bf
testing mechanism. The white space
in the line is optional, and any capitalization may be used. Further text on
the same line is treated as a comment. For example, you could have
# Exim filter <<== do not edit or remove this line! |
The remainder of the file is a sequence of filtering commands, which consist of keywords and data values. For example, in the command
deliver gulliver@lilliput.fict.example |
the keyword is ‘deliver’ and the data value is
‘gulliver@lilliput.fict.example’. White space or line breaks separate the
components of a command, except in the case of conditions for the if
command, where round brackets (parentheses) also act as separators. Complete
commands are separated from each other by white space or line breaks; there are
no special terminators. Thus, several commands may appear on one line, or one
command may be spread over a number of lines.
If the character # follows a separator anywhere in a command, everything from # up to the next newline is ignored. This provides a way of including comments in a filter file.
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There are two ways in which a data value can be input:
\n is replaced by a newline \r is replaced by a carriage return \t is replaced by a tab |
Backslash followed by up to three octal digits is replaced by the character specified by those digits, and ‘\x’ followed by up to two hexadecimal digits is treated similarly. Backslash followed by any other character is replaced by the second character, so that in particular, ‘\"’ becomes ‘"’ and ‘\\’ becomes ‘\’. A data item enclosed in double quotes can be continued onto the next line by ending the first line with a backslash. Any leading white space at the start of the continuation line is ignored.
In addition to the escape character processing that occurs when strings are enclosed in quotes, most data values are also subject to string expansion (as described in the next section), in which case the characters ‘$’ and ‘\’ are also significant. This means that if a single backslash is actually required in such a string, and the string is also quoted, ‘\\\\’ has to be entered.
The maximum permitted length of a data string, before expansion, is 1024 characters.
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Most data values are expanded before use. Expansion consists of replacing substrings beginning with ‘$’ with other text. The full expansion facilities available in Exim are extensive. If you want to know everything that Exim can do with strings, you should consult the chapter on string expansion in the Exim documentation.
In filter files, by far the most common use of string expansion is the substitution of the contents of a variable. For example, the substring
$reply_address |
is replaced by the address to which replies to the message should be sent. If such a variable name is followed by a letter or digit or underscore, it must be enclosed in curly brackets (braces), for example,
${reply_address} |
If a ‘$’ character is actually required in an expanded string, it must be escaped with a backslash, and because backslash is also an escape character in quoted input strings, it must be doubled in that case. The following two examples illustrate two different ways of testing for a ‘$’ character in a message:
if $message_body contains \$ then ... if $message_body contains "\\$" then ... |
You can prevent part of a string from being expanded by enclosing it between two occurrences of ‘\N’. For example,
if $message_body contains \N$$$$\N then ... |
tests for a run of four dollar characters.
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A complete list of the available variables is given in the Exim documentation. This shortened list contains the ones that are most likely to be useful in personal filter files:
$body_linecount
: The number of lines in the body of the message.
$body_zerocount
: The number of binary zero characters in the body of the
message.
$home
: In conventional configurations, this variable normally contains the
user's home directory. The system administrator can, however, change this.
$local_part
: The part of the email address that precedes the @ sign -
normally the user's login name. If support for multiple personal mailboxes is
enabled (see section Multiple personal mailboxes below) and a prefix or suffix for the local
part was recognized, it is removed from the string in this variable.
$local_part_prefix
: If support for multiple personal mailboxes is enabled
(see section Multiple personal mailboxes below), and a local part prefix was recognized,
this variable contains the prefix. Otherwise it contains an empty string.
$local_part_suffix
: If support for multiple personal mailboxes is enabled
(see section Multiple personal mailboxes below), and a local part suffix was recognized,
this variable contains the suffix. Otherwise it contains an empty string.
$message_body
: The initial portion of the body of the message. By default,
up to 500 characters are read into this variable, but the system administrator
can configure this to some other value. Newlines in the body are converted into
single spaces.
$message_body_end
: The final portion of the body of the message, formatted
and limited in the same way as $message_body
.
$message_body_size
: The size of the body of the message, in bytes.
$message_exim_id
: The message's local identification string, which is unique
for each message handled by a single host.
$message_headers
: The header lines of the message, concatenated into a
single string, with newline characters between them.
$message_size
: The size of the entire message, in bytes.
$original_local_part
: When an address that arrived with the message is
being processed, this contains the same value as the variable $local_part
.
However, if an address generated by an alias, forward, or filter file is being
processed, this variable contains the local part of the original address.
$reply_address
: The contents of the Reply-to: header, if the message
has one; otherwise the contents of the From: header. It is the address to
which normal replies to the message should be sent.
$return_path
: The return path - that is, the sender field that will be
transmitted as part of the message's envelope if the message is sent to another
host. This is the address to which delivery errors are sent. In many cases,
this variable has the same value as $sender_address
, but if, for example,
an incoming message to a mailing list has been expanded, $return_path
may
have been changed to contain the address of the list maintainer.
$sender_address
: The sender address that was received in the envelope of
the message. This is not necessarily the same as the contents of the From:
or Sender: header lines. For delivery error messages ("bounce messages")
there is no sender address, and this variable is empty.
$tod_full
: A full version of the time and date, for example: Wed, 18 Oct
1995 09:51:40 +0100. The timezone is always given as a numerical offset from
GMT.
$tod_log
: The time and date in the format used for writing Exim's log files,
without the timezone, for example: 1995-10-12 15:32:29.
$tod_zone
: The local timezone offset, for example: +0100.
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There is a special set of expansion variables containing the header lines of
the message being processed. These variables have names beginning with
$header_
followed by the name of the header line, terminated by a colon.
For example,
$header_from: $header_subject: |
The whole item, including the terminating colon, is replaced by the contents of the message header line. If there is more than one header line with the same name, their contents are concatenated. For header lines whose data consists of a list of addresses (for example, From: and To:), a comma and newline is inserted between each set of data. For all other header lines, just a newline is used.
Leading and trailing white space is removed from header line data, and if there
are any MIME "words" that are encoded as defined by RFC 2047 (because they
contain non-ASCII characters), they are decoded and translated, if possible, to
a local character set. Translation is attempted only on operating systems that
have the iconv()
function. This makes the header line look the same as it
would when displayed by an MUA. The default character set is ISO-8859-1, but
this can be changed by means of the headers
command (see below).
If you want to see the actual characters that make up a header line, you can
specify $rheader_
instead of $header_
. This inserts the "raw"
header line, unmodified.
There is also an intermediate form, requested by $bheader_
, which removes
leading and trailing space and decodes MIME "words", but does not do any
character translation. If an attempt to decode what looks superficially like a
MIME "word" fails, the raw string is returned. If decoding produces a binary
zero character, it is replaced by a question mark.
The capitalization of the name following $header_
is not significant.
Because any printing character except colon may appear in the name of a
message's header (this is a requirement of RFC 2822, the document that
describes the format of a mail message) curly brackets must not be used in
this case, as they will be taken as part of the header name. Two shortcuts are
allowed in naming header variables:
$header_
, $rheader_
, or $bheader_
can be
abbreviated to $h_
, $rh_
, or $bh_
, respectively.
If the message does not contain a header of the given name, an empty string is
substituted. Thus it is important to spell the names of headers correctly. Do
not use $header_Reply_to
when you really mean $header_Reply-to
.
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There are ten user variables with names $n0
- $n9
that can be
incremented by the add
command (see section The add command). These can be
used for "scoring" messages in various ways. If Exim is configured to run a
"system filter" on every message, the values left in these variables are
copied into the variables $sn0
- $sn9
at the end of the system filter,
thus making them available to users' filter files. How these values are used is
entirely up to the individual installation.
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The contents of your filter file should not make any assumptions about the
current directory. It is best to use absolute paths for file names; you can
normally make use of the $home
variable to refer to your home directory. The
save
command automatically inserts $home
at the start of non-absolute
paths.
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When in the course of delivery a message is processed by a filter file, what happens next, that is, after the filter file has been processed, depends on whether or not the filter sets up any significant deliveries. If at least one significant delivery is set up, the filter is considered to have handled the entire delivery arrangements for the current address, and no further processing of the address takes place. If, however, no significant deliveries are set up, Exim continues processing the current address as if there were no filter file, and typically sets up a delivery of a copy of the message into a local mailbox. In particular, this happens in the special case of a filter file containing only comments.
The delivery commands deliver
, save
, and pipe
are by default
significant. However, if such a command is preceded by the word "unseen", its
delivery is not considered to be significant. In contrast, other commands such
as mail
and vacation
do not set up significant deliveries unless
preceded by the word "seen". The following example commands set up
significant deliveries:
deliver jack@beanstalk.example pipe $home/bin/mymailscript seen mail subject "message discarded" seen finish |
The following example commands do not set up significant deliveries:
unseen deliver jack@beanstalk.example unseen pipe $home/bin/mymailscript mail subject "message discarded" finish |
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The filter commands that are described in subsequent sections are listed below, with the section in which they are described in brackets:
| increment a user variable (section The add command) |
| deliver to an email address (section The deliver command) |
| force delivery failure (sysadmin use) (section The fail command) |
| end processing (section The finish command) |
| freeze message (sysadmin use) (section The freeze command) |
| set the header character set (section The headers command) |
| test condition(s) (section Obeying commands conditionally) |
| define log file (section Logging commands) |
| write to log file (section Logging commands) |
| send a reply message (section Mail commands) |
| pipe to a command (section The pipe command) |
| save to a file (section The save command) |
| print while testing (section The testprint command) |
| tailored form of |
The headers
command has additional parameters that can be used only in a
system filter. The fail
and freeze
commands are available only when
Exim's filtering facilities are being used as a system filter, and are
therefore usable only by the system administrator and not by ordinary users.
They are mentioned only briefly in this document; for more information, see the
main Exim specification.
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add <number> to <user variable> e.g. add 2 to n3 |
There are 10 user variables of this type, with names $n0
- $n9
. Their
values can be obtained by the normal expansion syntax (for example $n3
) in
other commands. At the start of filtering, these variables all contain zero.
Both arguments of the add
command are expanded before use, making it
possible to add variables to each other. Subtraction can be obtained by adding
negative numbers.
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deliver <mail address> e.g. deliver "Dr Livingstone <David@somewhere.africa.example>" |
This command provides a forwarding operation. The delivery that it sets up is
significant unless the command is preceded by "unseen" (see section
Significant deliveries). The message is sent on to the given address, exactly as
happens if the address had appeared in a traditional ‘.forward’ file. If you
want to deliver the message to a number of different addresses, you can use
more than one deliver
command (each one may have only one address).
However, duplicate addresses are discarded.
To deliver a copy of the message to your normal mailbox, your login name can be given as the address. Once an address has been processed by the filtering mechanism, an identical generated address will not be so processed again, so doing this does not cause a loop.
However, if you have a mail alias, you should not refer to it here. For example, if the mail address L.Gulliver is aliased to lg303 then all references in Gulliver's ‘.forward’ file should be to lg303. A reference to the alias will not work for messages that are addressed to that alias, since, like ‘.forward’ file processing, aliasing is performed only once on an address, in order to avoid looping.
Following the new address, an optional second address, preceded by "errors_to" may appear. This changes the address to which delivery errors on the forwarded message will be sent. Instead of going to the message's original sender, they go to this new address. For ordinary users, the only value that is permitted for this address is the user whose filter file is being processed. For example, the user lg303 whose mailbox is in the domain lilliput.example could have a filter file that contains
deliver jon@elsewhere.example errors_to lg303@lilliput.example |
Clearly, using this feature makes sense only in situations where not all messages are being forwarded. In particular, bounce messages must not be forwarded in this way, as this is likely to create a mail loop if something goes wrong.
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save <file name> e.g. save $home/mail/bookfolder |
This command specifies that a copy of the message is to be appended to the
given file (that is, the file is to be used as a mail folder). The delivery
that save
sets up is significant unless the command is preceded by
"unseen" (see section Significant deliveries).
More than one save
command may be obeyed; each one causes a copy of the
message to be written to its argument file, provided they are different
(duplicate save
commands are ignored).
If the file name does not start with a / character, the contents of the
$home
variable are prepended, unless it is empty, or the system
administrator has disabled this feature. In conventional configurations, this
variable is normally set in a user filter to the user's home directory, but the
system administrator may set it to some other path. In some configurations,
$home
may be unset, or prepending may be disabled, in which case a
non-absolute path name may be generated. Such configurations convert this to an
absolute path when the delivery takes place. In a system filter, $home
is
never set.
The user must of course have permission to write to the file, and the writing of the file takes place in a process that is running as the user, under the user's primary group. Any secondary groups to which the user may belong are not normally taken into account, though the system administrator can configure Exim to set them up. In addition, the ability to use this command at all is controlled by the system administrator - it may be forbidden on some systems.
An optional mode value may be given after the file name. The value for the mode is interpreted as an octal number, even if it does not begin with a zero. For example:
save /some/folder 640 |
This makes it possible for users to override the system-wide mode setting for file deliveries, which is normally 600. If an existing file does not have the correct mode, it is changed.
An alternative form of delivery may be enabled on your system, in which each
message is delivered into a new file in a given directory. If this is the case,
this functionality can be requested by giving the directory name terminated by
a slash after the save
command, for example
save separated/messages/ |
There are several different formats for such deliveries; check with your system administrator or local documentation to find out which (if any) are available on your system. If this functionality is not enabled, the use of a path name ending in a slash causes an error.
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pipe <command> e.g. pipe "$home/bin/countmail $sender_address" |
This command specifies that the message is to be delivered to the specified command using a pipe. The delivery that it sets up is significant unless the command is preceded by "unseen" (see section Significant deliveries). Remember, however, that no deliveries are done while the filter is being processed. All deliveries happen later on. Therefore, the result of running the pipe is not available to the filter.
When the deliveries are done, a separate process is run, and a copy of the
message is passed on its standard input. The process runs as the user, under
the user's primary group. Any secondary groups to which the user may belong are
not normally taken into account, though the system administrator can configure
Exim to set them up. More than one pipe
command may appear; each one causes
a copy of the message to be written to its argument pipe, provided they are
different (duplicate pipe
commands are ignored).
When the time comes to transport the message, the command supplied to pipe
is split up by Exim into a command name and a number of arguments. These are
delimited by white space except for arguments enclosed in double quotes, in
which case backslash is interpreted as an escape, or in single quotes, in which
case no escaping is recognized. Note that as the whole command is normally
supplied in double quotes, a second level of quoting is required for internal
double quotes. For example:
pipe "$home/myscript \"size is $message_size\"" |
String expansion is performed on the separate components after the line has been split up, and the command is then run directly by Exim; it is not run under a shell. Therefore, substitution cannot change the number of arguments, nor can quotes, backslashes or other shell metacharacters in variables cause confusion.
Documentation for some programs that are normally run via this kind of pipe often suggest that the command should start with
IFS=" " |
This is a shell command, and should not be present in Exim filter files, since it does not normally run the command under a shell.
However, there is an option that the administrator can set to cause a shell to be used. In this case, the entire command is expanded as a single string and passed to the shell for interpretation. It is recommended that this be avoided if at all possible, since it can lead to problems when inserted variables contain shell metacharacters.
The default PATH set up for the command is determined by the system
administrator, usually containing at least ‘/bin’ and ‘/usr/bin’ so that
common commands are available without having to specify an absolute file name.
However, it is possible for the system administrator to restrict the pipe
facility so that the command name must not contain any / characters, and must
be found in one of the directories in the configured PATH. It is also possible
for the system administrator to lock out the use of the pipe
command
altogether.
When the command is run, a number of environment variables are set up. The complete list for pipe deliveries may be found in the Exim reference manual. Those that may be useful for pipe deliveries from user filter files are:
DOMAIN the domain of the address HOME your home directory LOCAL_PART see below LOCAL_PART_PREFIX see below LOCAL_PART_SUFFIX see below LOGNAME your login name MESSAGE_ID the unique id of the message PATH the command search path RECIPIENT the complete recipient address SENDER the sender of the message SHELL /bin/sh USER see below |
LOCAL_PART, LOGNAME, and USER are all set to the same value, namely, your login id. LOCAL_PART_PREFIX and LOCAL_PART_SUFFIX may be set if Exim is configured to recognize prefixes or suffixes in the local parts of addresses. For example, a message addressed to pat-suf2@domain.example may cause the filter for user pat to be run. If this sets up a pipe delivery, LOCAL_PART_SUFFIX is ‘-suf2’ when the pipe command runs. The system administrator has to configure Exim specially for this feature to be available.
If you run a command that is a shell script, be very careful in your use of data from the incoming message in the commands in your script. RFC 2822 is very generous in the characters that are permitted to appear in mail addresses, and in particular, an address may begin with a vertical bar or a slash. For this reason you should always use quotes round any arguments that involve data from the message, like this:
/some/command '$SENDER' |
so that inserted shell meta-characters do not cause unwanted effects.
Remember that, as was explained earlier, the pipe command is not run at the time the filter file is interpreted. The filter just defines what deliveries are required for one particular addressee of a message. The deliveries themselves happen later, once Exim has decided everything that needs to be done for the message.
A consequence of this is that you cannot inspect the return code from the pipe command from within the filter. Nevertheless, the code returned by the command is important, because Exim uses it to decide whether the delivery has succeeded or failed.
The command should return a zero completion code if all has gone well. Most non-zero codes are treated by Exim as indicating a failure of the pipe. This is treated as a delivery failure, causing the message to be returned to its sender. However, there are some completion codes that are treated as temporary errors. The message remains on Exim's spool disk, and the delivery is tried again later, though it will ultimately time out if the delivery failures go on too long. The completion codes to which this applies can be specified by the system administrator; the default values are 73 and 75.
The pipe command should not normally write anything to its standard output or standard error file descriptors. If it does, whatever is written is normally returned to the sender of the message as a delivery error, though this action can be varied by the system administrator.
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There are two commands that cause the creation of a new mail message, neither of which count as a significant delivery unless the command is preceded by the word "seen" (see section Significant deliveries). This is a powerful facility, but it should be used with care, because of the danger of creating infinite sequences of messages. The system administrator can forbid the use of these commands altogether.
To help prevent runaway message sequences, these commands have no effect when the incoming message is a bounce (delivery error) message, and messages sent by this means are treated as if they were reporting delivery errors. Thus, they should never themselves cause a bounce message to be returned. The basic mail-sending command is
mail [to <address-list>] [cc <address-list>] [bcc <address-list>] [from <address>] [reply_to <address>] [subject <text>] [extra_headers <text>] [text <text>] [[expand] file <filename>] [return message] [log <log file name>] [once <note file name>] [once_repeat <time interval>] e.g. mail text "Your message about $h_subject: has been received" |
Each <address-list> can contain a number of addresses, separated by commas, in the format of a To: or Cc: header line. In fact, the text you supply here is copied exactly into the appropriate header line. It may contain additional information as well as email addresses. For example:
mail to "Julius Caesar <jc@rome.example>, \ <ma@rome.example> (Mark A.)" |
Similarly, the texts supplied for from
and reply_to
are copied into
their respective header lines.
As a convenience for use in one common case, there is also a command called
vacation
. It behaves in the same way as mail
, except that the defaults
for the subject
, file
, log
, once
, and once_repeat
options
are
subject "On vacation" expand file .vacation.msg log .vacation.log once .vacation once_repeat 7d |
respectively. These are the same file names and repeat period used by the
traditional Unix vacation
command. The defaults can be overridden by
explicit settings, but if a file name is given its contents are expanded only
if explicitly requested.
Warning: The vacation
command should always be used conditionally,
subject to at least the personal
condition (see section Testing for personal mail
below) so as not to send automatic replies to non-personal messages from
mailing lists or elsewhere. Sending an automatic response to a mailing list or
a mailing list manager is an Internet Sin.
For both commands, the key/value argument pairs can appear in any order. At
least one of text
or file
must appear (except with vacation
, where
there is a default for file
); if both are present, the text string appears
first in the message. If expand
precedes file
, each line of the file is
subject to string expansion before it is included in the message.
Several lines of text can be supplied to text
by including the escape
sequence "\n" in the string wherever a newline is required. If the command is
output during filter file testing, newlines in the text are shown as "\n".
Note that the keyword for creating a Reply-To: header is reply_to
,
because Exim keywords may contain underscores, but not hyphens. If the from
keyword is present and the given address does not match the user who owns the
forward file, Exim normally adds a Sender: header to the message, though it
can be configured not to do this.
The extra_headers
keyword allows you to add custom header lines to the
message. The text supplied must be one or more syntactically valid RFC 2822
header lines. You can use "\n" within quoted text to specify newlines between
headers, and also to define continued header lines. For example:
extra_headers "h1: first\nh2: second\n continued\nh3: third" |
No newline should appear at the end of the final header line.
If no to
argument appears, the message is sent to the address in the
$reply_address
variable (see section String expansion above).
An In-Reply-To: header is automatically included in the created message,
giving a reference to the message identification of the incoming message.
If return message
is specified, the incoming message that caused the filter
file to be run is added to the end of the message, subject to a maximum size
limitation.
If a log file is specified, a line is added to it for each message sent.
If a once
file is specified, it is used to hold a database for remembering
who has received a message, and no more than one message is ever sent to any
particular address, unless once_repeat
is set. This specifies a time
interval after which another copy of the message is sent. The interval is
specified as a sequence of numbers, each followed by the initial letter of one
of "seconds", "minutes", "hours", "days", or "weeks". For example,
once_repeat 5d4h |
causes a new message to be sent if at least 5 days and 4 hours have elapsed since the last one was sent. There must be no white space in a time interval.
Commonly, the file name specified for once
is used as the base name for
direct-access (DBM) file operations. There are a number of different DBM
libraries in existence. Some operating systems provide one as a default, but
even in this case a different one may have been used when building Exim. With
some DBM libraries, specifying once
results in two files being created,
with the suffixes ‘.dir’ and ‘.pag’ being added to the given name. With
some others a single file with the suffix ‘.db’ is used, or the name is used
unchanged.
Using a DBM file for implementing the once
feature means that the file
grows as large as necessary. This is not usually a problem, but some system
administrators want to put a limit on it. The facility can be configured not to
use a DBM file, but instead, to use a regular file with a maximum size. The
data in such a file is searched sequentially, and if the file fills up, the
oldest entry is deleted to make way for a new one. This means that some
correspondents may receive a second copy of the message after an unpredictable
interval. Consult your local information to see if your system is configured
this way.
More than one mail
or vacation
command may be obeyed in a single filter
run; they are all honoured, even when they are to the same recipient.
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A log can be kept of actions taken by a filter file. This facility is normally available in conventional configurations, but there are some situations where it might not be. Also, the system administrator may choose to disable it. Check your local information if in doubt.
Logging takes place while the filter file is being interpreted. It does not queue up for later like the delivery commands. The reason for this is so that a log file need be opened only once for several write operations. There are two commands, neither of which constitutes a significant delivery. The first defines a file to which logging output is subsequently written:
logfile <file name> e.g. logfile $home/filter.log |
The file name must be fully qualified. You can use $home
, as in this
example, to refer to your home directory. The file name may optionally be
followed by a mode for the file, which is used if the file has to be created.
For example,
logfile $home/filter.log 0644 |
The number is interpreted as octal, even if it does not begin with a zero.
The default for the mode is 600. It is suggested that the logfile
command
normally appear as the first command in a filter file. Once a log file has
been obeyed, the logwrite
command can be used to write to it:
logwrite "<some text string>" e.g. logwrite "$tod_log $message_id processed" |
It is possible to have more than one logfile
command, to specify writing to
different log files in different circumstances. Writing takes place at the end
of the file, and a newline character is added to the end of each string if
there isn't one already there. Newlines can be put in the middle of the string
by using the "\n" escape sequence. Lines from simultaneous deliveries may get
interleaved in the file, as there is no interlocking, so you should plan your
logging with this in mind. However, data should not get lost.
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The command finish
, which has no arguments, causes Exim to stop
interpreting the filter file. This is not a significant action unless preceded
by "seen". A filter file containing only "seen finish" is a black hole.
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It is sometimes helpful to be able to print out the values of variables when testing filter files. The command
testprint <text> e.g. testprint "home=$home reply_address=$reply_address" |
does nothing when mail is being delivered. However, when the filtering code is
being tested by means of the -bf
option (see section Testing a new filter file
above), the value of the string is written to the standard output.
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When Exim's filtering facilities are being used as a system filter, the
fail
command is available, to force delivery failure. Because this command
is normally usable only by the system administrator, and not enabled for use by
ordinary users, it is described in more detail in the main Exim specification
rather than in this document.
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When Exim's filtering facilities are being used as a system filter, the
freeze
command is available, to freeze a message on the queue. Because this
command is normally usable only by the system administrator, and not enabled
for use by ordinary users, it is described in more detail in the main Exim
specification rather than in this document.
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The headers
command can be used to change the target character set that is
used when translating the contents of encoded header lines for insertion by the
$header_
mechanism (see section Header variables above). The
default can be set in the Exim configuration; if not specified, ISO-8859-1 is
used. The only currently supported format for the headers
command in user
filters is as in this example:
headers charset "UTF-8" |
That is, headers
is followed by the word "charset" and then the name of a
character set. This particular example would be useful if you wanted to compare
the contents of a header to a UTF-8 string.
In system filter files, the headers
command can be used to add or remove
header lines from the message. These features are described in the main Exim
specification.
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Most of the power of filtering comes from the ability to test conditions and
obey different commands depending on the outcome. The if
command is used to
specify conditional execution, and its general form is
if <condition> then <commands> elif <condition> then <commands> else <commands> endif |
There may be any number of elif
and then
sections (including none) and
the else
section is also optional. Any number of commands, including nested
if
commands, may appear in any of the <commands> sections.
Conditions can be combined by using the words and
and or
, and round
brackets (parentheses) can be used to specify how several conditions are to
combine. Without brackets, and
is more binding than or
. For example:
if $h_subject: contains "Make money" or $h_precedence: is "junk" or ($h_sender: matches ^\\d{8}@ and not personal) or $message_body contains "this is not spam" then seen finish endif |
A condition can be preceded by not
to negate it, and there are also some
negative forms of condition that are more English-like.
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There are a number of conditions that operate on text strings, using the words "begins", "ends", "is", "contains" and "matches". If you want to apply the same test to more than one header line, you can easily concatenate them into a single string for testing, as in this example:
if "$h_to:, $h_cc:" contains me@domain.example then ... |
If a string-testing condition name is written in lower case, the testing of letters is done without regard to case; if it is written in upper case (for example, "CONTAINS"), the case of letters is taken into account.
<text1> begins <text2> <text1> does not begin <text2> e.g. $header_from: begins "Friend@" |
A "begins" test checks for the presence of the second string at the start of the first, both strings having been expanded.
<text1> ends <text2> <text1> does not end <text2> e.g. $header_from: ends "public.com.example" |
An "ends" test checks for the presence of the second string at the end of the first, both strings having been expanded.
<text1> is <text2> <text1> is not <text2> e.g. $local_part_suffix is "-foo" |
An "is" test does an exact match between the strings, having first expanded both strings.
<text1> contains <text2> <text1> does not contain <text2> e.g. $header_subject: contains "evolution" |
A "contains" test does a partial string match, having expanded both strings.
<text1> matches <text2> <text1> does not match <text2> e.g. $sender_address matches "(bill|john)@" |
For a "matches" test, after expansion of both strings, the second one is interpreted as a regular expression. Exim uses the PCRE regular expression library, which provides regular expressions that are compatible with Perl.
The match succeeds if the regular expression matches any part of the first string. If you want a regular expression to match only at the start or end of the subject string, you must encode that requirement explicitly, using the ‘^’ or ‘$’ metacharacters. The above example, which is not so constrained, matches all these addresses:
bill@test.example john@some.example spoonbill@example.com littlejohn@example.com |
To match only the first two, you could use this:
if $sender_address matches "^(bill|john)@" then ... |
Care must be taken if you need a backslash in a regular expression, because backslashes are interpreted as escape characters both by the string expansion code and by Exim's normal processing of strings in quotes. For example, if you want to test the sender address for a domain ending in .com the regular expression is
\.com$ |
The backslash and dollar sign in that expression have to be escaped when used in a filter command, as otherwise they would be interpreted by the expansion code. Thus, what you actually write is
if $sender_address matches \\.com\$ |
An alternative way of handling this is to make use of the ‘\N’ expansion flag for suppressing expansion:
if $sender_address matches \N\.com$\N |
Everything between the two occurrences of ‘\N’ is copied without change by the string expander (and in fact you do not need the final one, because it is at the end of the string). If the regular expression is given in quotes (mandatory only if it contains white space) you have to write either
if $sender_address matches "\\\\.com\\$" |
or
if $sender_address matches "\\N\\.com$\\N" |
If the regular expression contains bracketed sub-expressions, numeric
variable substitutions such as $1
can be used in the subsequent actions
after a successful match. If the match fails, the values of the numeric
variables remain unchanged. Previous values are not restored after endif
.
In other words, only one set of values is ever available. If the condition
contains several sub-conditions connected by and
or or
, it is the
strings extracted from the last successful match that are available in
subsequent actions. Numeric variables from any one sub-condition are also
available for use in subsequent sub-conditions, because string expansion of a
condition occurs just before it is tested.
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The following conditions are available for performing numerical tests:
<number1> is above <number2> <number1> is not above <number2> <number1> is below <number2> <number1> is not below <number2> e.g. $message_size is not above 10k |
The <number> arguments must expand to strings of digits, optionally followed by one of the letters K or M (upper case or lower case) which cause multiplication by 1024 and 1024x1024 respectively.
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You can use the delivered
condition to test whether or not any previously
obeyed filter commands have set up a significant delivery. For example:
if not delivered then save mail/anomalous endif |
"Delivered" is perhaps a poor choice of name for this condition, because the message has not actually been delivered; rather, a delivery has been set up for later processing.
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The condition error_message
is true if the incoming message is a bounce
(mail delivery error) message. Putting the command
if error_message then finish endif |
at the head of your filter file is a useful insurance against things going
wrong in such a way that you cannot receive delivery error reports. Note:
error_message
is a condition, not an expansion variable, and therefore is
not preceded by ‘$’.
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There is a facility for looping through a list of addresses and applying a condition to each of them. It takes the form
foranyaddress <string> (<condition>) |
where <string> is interpreted as a list of RFC 2822 addresses, as in a typical header line, and <condition> is any valid filter condition or combination of conditions. The "group" syntax that is defined for certain header lines that contain addresses is supported.
The parentheses surrounding the condition are mandatory, to delimit it from
possible further sub-conditions of the enclosing if
command. Within the
condition, the expansion variable $thisaddress
is set to the non-comment
portion of each of the addresses in the string in turn. For example, if the
string is
B.Simpson <bart@sfld.example>, lisa@sfld.example (his sister) |
then $thisaddress
would take on the values ‘bart@sfld.example’ and
‘lisa@sfld.example’ in turn.
If there are no valid addresses in the list, the whole condition is false. If the internal condition is true for any one address, the overall condition is true and the loop ends. If the internal condition is false for all addresses in the list, the overall condition is false. This example tests for the presence of an eight-digit local part in any address in a To: header:
if foranyaddress $h_to: ( $thisaddress matches ^\\d{8}@ ) then ... |
When the overall condition is true, the value of $thisaddress
in the
commands that follow then
is the last value it took on inside the loop. At
the end of the if
command, the value of $thisaddress
is reset to what it
was before. It is best to avoid the use of multiple occurrences of
foranyaddress
, nested or otherwise, in a single if
command, if the
value of $thisaddress
is to be used afterwards, because it isn't always
clear what the value will be. Nested if
commands should be used instead.
Header lines can be joined together if a check is to be applied to more than one of them. For example:
if foranyaddress $h_to:,$h_cc: .... |
This scans through the addresses in both the To: and the Cc: headers.
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A common requirement is to distinguish between incoming personal mail and mail from a mailing list, or from a robot or other automatic process (for example, a bounce message). In particular, this test is normally required for "vacation messages".
The personal
condition checks that the message is not a bounce message and
that the current user's email address appears in the To: header. It also
checks that the sender is not the current user or one of a number of common
daemons, and that there are no header lines starting List- in the message.
Finally, it checks the content of the Precedence: header line, if there is
one.
You should always use the personal
condition when generating automatic
responses. This example shows the use of personal
in a filter file that is
sending out vacation messages:
if personal then mail to $reply_address subject "I am on holiday" file $home/vacation/message once $home/vacation/once once_repeat 10d endif |
It is tempting, when writing commands like the above, to quote the original subject in the reply. For example:
subject "Re: $h_subject:" |
There is a danger in doing this, however. It may allow a third party to subscribe you to an opt-in mailing list, provided that the list accepts bounce messages as subscription confirmations. (Messages sent from filters are always sent as bounce messages.) Well-managed lists require a non-bounce message to confirm a subscription, so the danger is relatively small.
If prefixes or suffixes are in use for local parts - something which depends on the configuration of Exim (see section Multiple personal mailboxes below) - the tests for the current user are done with the full address (including the prefix and suffix, if any) as well as with the prefix and suffix removed. If the system is configured to rewrite local parts of mail addresses, for example, to rewrite ‘dag46’ as ‘Dirk.Gently’, the rewritten form of the address is also used in the tests.
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It is quite common for people who have mail accounts on a number of different
systems to forward all their mail to one system, and in this case a check for
personal mail should test all their various mail addresses. To allow for this,
the personal
condition keyword can be followed by
alias <address> |
any number of times, for example:
if personal alias smith@else.where.example alias jones@other.place.example then ... |
The alias addresses are treated as alternatives to the current user's email address when testing the contents of header lines.
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The basic personal
test is roughly equivalent to the following:
not error_message and $message_headers does not contain "\nList-Id:" and $message_headers does not contain "\nList-Help:" and $message_headers does not contain "\nList-Subscribe:" and $message_headers does not contain "\nList-Unsubscribe:" and $message_headers does not contain "\nList-Post:" and $message_headers does not contain "\nList-Owner:" and $message_headers does not contain "\nList-Archive:" and ( "${if def h_auto-submitted:{present}{absent}}" is "absent" or $header_auto-submitted: is "no" ) and $header_precedence: does not contain "bulk" and $header_precedence: does not contain "list" and $header_precedence: does not contain "junk" and foranyaddress $header_to: ( $thisaddress contains "$local_part$domain" ) and not foranyaddress $header_from: ( $thisaddress contains "$local_part@$domain" or $thisaddress contains "server@" or $thisaddress contains "daemon@" or $thisaddress contains "root@" or $thisaddress contains "listserv@" or $thisaddress contains "majordomo@" or $thisaddress contains "-request@" or $thisaddress matches "^owner-[^@]+@" ) |
The variable $local_part
contains the local part of the mail address of
the user whose filter file is being run - it is normally your login id. The
$domain
variable contains the mail domain. As explained above, if aliases
or rewriting are defined, or if prefixes or suffixes are in use, the tests for
the current user are also done with alternative addresses.
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There are two conditions that are intended mainly for use in system filter
files, but which are available in users' filter files as well. The condition
first_delivery
is true if this is the first process that is attempting to
deliver the message, and false otherwise. This indicator is not reset until the
first delivery process successfully terminates; if there is a crash or a power
failure (for example), the next delivery attempt is also a "first delivery".
In a user filter file first_delivery
will be false if there was previously
an error in the filter, or if a delivery for the user failed owing to, for
example, a quota error, or if forwarding to a remote address was deferred for
some reason.
The condition manually_thawed
is true if the message was "frozen" for
some reason, and was subsequently released by the system administrator. It is
unlikely to be of use in users' filter files.
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The system administrator can configure Exim so that users can set up variants on their email addresses and handle them separately. Consult your system administrator or local documentation to see if this facility is enabled on your system, and if so, what the details are.
The facility involves the use of a prefix or a suffix on an email address. For example, all mail addressed to lg303-<something> would be the property of user lg303, who could determine how it was to be handled, depending on the value of <something>.
There are two possible ways in which this can be set up. The first possibility is the use of multiple ‘.forward’ files. In this case, mail to lg303-foo, for example, is handled by looking for a file called ‘.forward-foo’ in lg303's home directory. If such a file does not exist, delivery fails and the message is returned to its sender.
The alternative approach is to pass all messages through a single ‘.forward’
file, which must be a filter file so that it can distinguish between the
different cases by referencing the variables $local_part_prefix
or
$local_part_suffix
, as in the final example in section Examples of Exim filter commands below.
It is possible to configure Exim to support both schemes at once. In this case, a specific ‘.forward-foo’ file is first sought; if it is not found, the basic ‘.forward’ file is used.
The personal
test (see section Testing for personal mail) includes prefixes and
suffixes in its checking.
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As was explained above, filtering just sets up addresses for delivery - no deliveries are actually done while a filter file is active. If any of the generated addresses subsequently suffers a delivery failure, an error message is generated in the normal way. However, if a filter command that sets up a delivery is preceded by the word "noerror", errors for that delivery, and any deliveries consequent on it (that is, from alias, forwarding, or filter files it invokes) are ignored.
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Simple forwarding:
# Exim filter deliver baggins@rivendell.middle-earth.example |
Vacation handling using traditional means, assuming that the ‘.vacation.msg’ and other files have been set up in your home directory:
# Exim filter unseen pipe "/usr/ucb/vacation \"$local_part\"" |
Vacation handling inside Exim, having first created a file called ‘.vacation.msg’ in your home directory:
# Exim filter if personal then vacation endif |
File some messages by subject:
# Exim filter if $header_subject: contains "empire" or $header_subject: contains "foundation" then save $home/mail/f+e endif |
Save all non-urgent messages by weekday:
# Exim filter if $header_subject: does not contain "urgent" and $tod_full matches "^(...)," then save $home/mail/$1 endif |
Throw away all mail from one site, except from postmaster:
# Exim filter if $reply_address contains "@spam.site.example" and $reply_address does not contain "postmaster@" then seen finish endif |
Handle multiple personal mailboxes:
# Exim filter if $local_part_suffix is "-foo" then save $home/mail/foo elif $local_part_suffix is "-bar" then save $home/mail/bar endif |
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