courierperlfilter — Sample Perl-based mail filter
filterctl [[start] | [stop]] [perlfilter]
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 5.10 or higher. The best way to
create a Perl filter is to start with the sample filter,
/usr/lib/courier/share/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).
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).
A lot of the Perl glue code is based on examples from the
perlembed manual page, and other sources.
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/spool/courier/allfilters, otherwise the socket
will be created in /var/spool/courier/filters, see
courierfilter(8)
for more information.
/etc/courier/filters/perlfilter-numprocsThis 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/perlfilterThis file MUST exist and it must contain a single line of text with the filename of the Perl script to load.
/usr/lib/courier/share/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.
/usr/lib/courier/share/perlfilter-ratelimit.plThis is a complete Perl-based filter than implements basic rate-limiting features.
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.