From: emurphy@cs.uno.edu (Edward Murphy)
Subject: (? FOLLOWUP) procmail and processing FAXes
Keywords: confusion
Organization: University of New Orleans
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 16:03:29 GMT

One user wrote to me some question concerning my problem (see previous  
messages in either group by me, Edward Murphy...). Below is an excerpt  
from my reply. Names omitted because I felt like it. :) The persons  
questions and comments are preceded with > sign.

A note: The question (in a nutshell) is, when I have a NeXT mail message  
which has a read receipt attached, how can I change the receipient of the  
read receipt in the NeXT mail header.

-----

Perhaps I explained it badly, let me try to clarify. 

When our NeXT receives a FAX, it is sent as a mail message to a particular  
account (a necessity for the FAX device as far as I can tell). There is no  
way for those who are sending the FAX to attach any significance to the  
data they are sending, i.e. Who is the FAX for? The only way we have at  
present is to have someone (who is trusted) open the FAX and look at the  
cover page. (Well, other than spending a *lot* of time and money on OCR  
software to interpret the image :)).

>
>Why do you need the student worker there to do the same thing 
>that procmail can do much faster and with more efficiency 
>(not to mention the privacy aspect)?
>

So, in answer to this first question, we need the student worker (who is  
trusted) to open the FAXes because there is no way for the system (either  
NeXT or procmail) to open that FAX image and see who it is for.

>
>It seems that both the student worker and the procmail program are 
>forwarding the FAX to it's intended recipient.  Since procmail is more 
>reliable than the student worker (including keeping a log, which the 
>student may not regularly do), I'm confused as to why you would want both 
>parties involved in getting FAXes from the entry point of your network to 
>the intended recipient.
>

Perhaps I did confuse some people. To better clear up the misunderstanding  
of the first sentence immediately above, allow me to try again: the  
student worker sends the FAX message to the procmail account with a code  
that uniquely identifies the person whom the FAX is for (this code is the  
Subject: field). The procmail account then examines to Subject field and  
forwards the mail message to the intended recipient. Also, up until we  
happened on procmail, the student worker was indeed logging all of the  
incoming FAXes as well as the subsequent Read Receipts. I am attempting to  
partially automate this so that a better and more consistent log of  
incoming messages and Read Receipts will be maintained (i.e. by procmail).

As a reminder: Thus far, I have gotten the procmail account to receive a  
FAX, log it, archive it, and forward it. However, the read receipt goes  
back to the original account, not the procmail account. Also, there is  
apparently, no way to tell sendmail to request an read acknowledgement.

Thank you for your interest in my problem, any suggestions would be  
welcome. If perhaps I have still not been clear, and you wish to pursue  
this, please do not hesitate to ask more questions. 

Ed Murphy
Grad Slave From Mars
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers,comp.sys.next.misc