converting TNEF attachments?

Nik777 kolab at babel.homelinux.net
Wed Dec 19 12:36:40 CET 2007


Hi All,

I am posting my solution to this at the request of someone on this list.

To refresh your memory of the original problem, see the original post 
quoted below.

The result is that I now have a system which filters email through a 
TNEF converter as part of the Kolab processing with postfix.

The system has been running on my Kolab server for over a month now, and 
aprt from the fact there have been no incoming TNEF emails in that time 
to actually prove it's working, everything seems correct.

I have written a brief HowTo which is here:

http://nik.homelinux.net/files/kolab-tnef-mini-howto.html

The howto contains links to all software needed.

Cheers!
Nik

> Hi All,
>
> I have switched our email from an old Sendmail/imapd machine to a new 
> Kolab machine. All users are extremely complimentary about the 
> performance and robustness of the new system.
>
> However, I had tnefclean installed and working on the old server, and 
> am now looking for a way to implement the same on Kolab. With 
> tnefclean, those nasty WINMAIL.DAT attachments were converted into 
> regular MIME attachments, so that non-Outlook users (eg Thunderbird) 
> could see and read them.
>
> I see that Kolab's amavisd does load Convert::TNEF at startup. 
> However, it seems this is just used so that such attachments are 
> scanned, rather than converting them to MIME.
>
> The tnefclean program is a perl script which can be run as a filter, 
> copying its modified output to stdout. So in my Sendmail 
> configuration, I simply added a rule to procmailrc which filtered all 
> mail through tnefclean.pl.
>
> So my question is: how can I easily get Kolab's postfix server to 
> filter all mail through tnefclean? I'm hoping that one of postfix's 
> filter options will be appropriate, although all documentation I've 
> read on that so far seems to indicate that I need to "reinject" 
> filtered emails back into a separate instance of postfix. Since 
> tnefclean is simply modifying a streamed email, I'm not sure if this 
> would work?
>
> I notice that there is procmail in my Kolab installation, but it seems 
> unused, and the only articles I found regarding enabling it stated I 
> had to put entries into my config files for all Kolab users. This is 
> not viable with our installation, as new users are created regularly 
> by non-technical office admin staff using the Kolab web interface. 
> They are not in a position to modify Kolab config files.
>
> It also seems that Sieve is not capable of calling an external filter 
> program? Am I correct on this?
>
>
> Can anyone advise on how I should do this, or on where I should start 
> testing?
>
> Many thanks in advance for all suggestions.
>
> Cheers!
> Nik




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