NAME

       courierperlfilter - Sample Perl-based mail filter

SYNOPSIS

       filterctl [[start] | [stop]] [perlfilter]

DESCRIPTION

       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 5.004 or higher. The best way to create a Perl filter is to start
       with the sample filter, /usr/lib/courier/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).

   Setting up a Perl script
       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).

CREDITS

       A lot of the Perl glue code is based on examples from the perlembed manual page, and other
       sources.

FILES

       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/lib/courier/allfilters, otherwise the socket will be created in
           /var/lib/courier/filters, see courierfilter(8)[1] for more information.

       /etc/courier/filters/perlfilter-numprocs
           This 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/perlfilter
           This file MUST exist and it must contain a single line of text with the filename of
           the Perl script to load.

       /usr/lib/courier/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.

       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.

SEE ALSO

       courierfilter(8)[1].

AUTHOR

       Sam Varshavchik
           Author

NOTES

        1. courierfilter(8)
           [set $man.base.url.for.relative.links]/courierfilter.html