Automatically attach a footer to e-mail sent through Sendmail SMTP?

April 21, 2008 1:12 PM

Automatically attach a footer to e-mail sent through Sendmail SMTP?

Looking documentation on how to automatically attach a customized footer to any e-mail relayed through my Sendmail server. Or any other SMTP server for that matter. Please help!

posted by doomtop to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Submitting your question to the Oracle of Google as "footer sendmail" returned this page. They and futher linked-to pages indicate that perhaps this is a difficult task with sendmail. Asking the Oracle again for SMTP and footers returned your previous query, which I figured meant I was heading in the wrong direction.

Bowing to the oracle once more I asked about "sendmail alternatives" which got me to postfix which seems to have support for such built-in. YMMV and I'm no expert there, but its available in Fedora...
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:41 PM on April 21, 2008

It looks like this can be done in sendmail with milter. Check out the mimedefang module. The only other MTA I've used is qmail, and you'd need to write a little custom pre-processor to append the footer.

Postfix addresses this in the FAQ, but is designed not to do this - like sendmail, you'd need to add this on.

This is one of those things that comes up on the qmail lists every so often and is met with howls of protests from mail purists.

(on preview, everything Ogre L. says above).
posted by jquinby at 1:44 PM on April 21, 2008

When I built a sendmail server, and had minor issues with it, the Usenet group comp.mail.sendmail was able to help almost instantly. I remember this question being asked frequently, but I don't know the answer, and it's not in the faq.

You might ask there, but I remember them being pretty hostile about people who don't rtfm first.
posted by ctmf at 2:34 PM on April 21, 2008

If I can make any recommendation to you regarding SMTP servers, it is this: use Postfix.
configuration options that (largely) make sense, no more having to recompile your prefs, and (arguably) more secure.

That being said, as many others have mentioned, postfix does support this practice.
As a mail admin, I implore of you - don't do this. The legal efficacy of such footers / disclaimers is questionable at best, and moreover they are extremely annoying, especially when people *shudder* topquote. Don't do that either. And don't get me started on html email...

I'm obviously something of an email zealot.
posted by namewithoutwords at 3:38 PM on April 22, 2008

"postfix does support this practice." well, for a certain definition of "support" anyway.
posted by namewithoutwords at 3:39 PM on April 22, 2008

If anyone was interested in this topic:

After getting the advice above, I started looking into Postfix as the solution. I eventually came upon this tutorial: http://howtoforge.com/add-disclaimers-to-outgoing-emails-with-altermime-postfix-debian-etch

Thanks everyone!
posted by doomtop at 7:33 AM on May 2, 2008