hellkvist.org

[Bas]

Hi,

I am not quite sure how to configure the sending through email option
on my server as it is hosted and I cannot create a Linux user.

Is this really the only way? What is the general idea? How does it work?

Cheers
Bas

[Peffis]

Well, the general idea is that you give each user a seperate email address to send to such as p-1234@peffis.com, p-4321@peffis.com and so on. All emails to these addresses gets sent to the same account - a so called catch all account that catches all emails to users that doesn't exist for real in the system. I set that user up to be the peffisaur user and that user has a .procmailrc that processes the incoming messages and extracts the info and so on using the recmail.pl script. So the unique email addresses is used to identify the sender.

But you can possibly do this in other ways but perhaps not as easy to use for the users. You could for instance give each user the same address and tell them to, say, write an identifyer in the subject line or in the body of the message or something so that you know who is sending the message. You will still have to be able to receive the incoming messages by script and extract the info that identifies the user. Just remember, people will be typing on a phone so complex indentification is not feasable.

Cheers,
Stefan

[Guest]

isnt the user identified by their phone number? - why does a user have to supply their phone number If the e-mail address is unique?

[Peffis]

Well, first of all. There's currently no real guarantee that the ID is unique so to counter this and to also make it a bit harder for someone to fake a post from someone else (you would just have to guess the ID to be able to post so a brute force attack is easy) another ID check was introduced. It takes this other ID from the from-address of the sender which just happens to be the phone number for several operators (but not always).