Anonymous mail

[A.S.Kamlet]

In article <387 at cullvax.UUCP> news at cullvax.UUCP (Mail and USENET News System maintenance account) writes:
>We are considering putting in an 'anonymous mail' facility, for use as
>a suggestion box.  The question is, is there an easy/known way to
>implement it.  I tried putting a line
>
>	anonymous: "| awk ' NR != 1 && ! /^From:/ {print} ' | sendmail xxx"
>
>in /usr/lib/aliases, so that awk would strip identifying lines from
>the message and then pass them to sendmail for routing to the eventual
>reader.  Unfortunately, sendmail (when delivering to anonymous), runs
>the command under the username of the sender of the message (which
>isn't documented, but makes sense from a security point of view), so
>the inner sendmail puts the original sender's name on it.
>
>The only simple solution which comes to mind is to write a C program
>that acts like the shell in setting up the pipe, and make the program
>suid to our 'news' account.  Is there a better way?
>
>Dale

Have you considered establishing a login "anon" which puts anyone
who logs in right into mail?

There would never be a record of who was on the system -- really anonymous.

(For security, you may want to modify mail to prevent an escape
to a subshell.)
-- 
Art Kamlet   AT&T Bell Laboratories  Columbus  {cbosgd | ihnp4}!cbrma!ask