gs.profile.email.relay

Relay messages to someone

Author

Michael JasonSmith

Contact

Michael JasonSmith <mpj17@onlinegroups.net>

Date

2015-03-17

Organization

GroupServer.org

Copyright

This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License by OnlineGroups.net.

Introduction

This product is responsible for relaying email messages to group members that use obfuscated email addresses.

Normally the address that appears in the From header of a message is sent out as-is¹. However, some sites have DMARC policies that require a modification the From header. GroupServer modifies the header by creating a new From address.

The new address is created from the profile-identifier (user-ID) of the member who sent the message. This obfuscated address works well for getting the message delivered. However, replies to these messages come back to GroupServer, rather than the original author. To overcome this problem these replies are detected and the messages sent on the original address. It is this relaying of messages that is carried out by this product.

The main thing defined by this product is a page that processes the message. However, the configuration for the relay-addresses is widely used in GroupServer.

Page

The page gs-profile-email-relay.html in the site context provides a web hook that allows an email message to be relayed by the incoming message processing script ². The form takes the email message as a base-64 encoded string, and the authentication token, and relays it on.

The user-identifier for a group member is extracted from the To address. The email message is then sent onto the preferred email address of the member.

Configuration

There are two parts to the configuration of this product: the token and the prefix.

Token

The token in the webservice section is used to provide the token to the script that processing incoming email for GroupServer³.

[webservice-default]
token = thisIsAToken

Prefix

Email messages that need to be relayed will have a To address with a particular prefix. By default the prefix is p- (short for profile, much like the /p/ URLs). This prefix is stripped off the front of the mbox part of the email address in order to generate the user-identifier.

However, the default prefix can be changed by adding the relay-address-prefix option to the smtp configuration section. For example, the following will change the prefix to human-resource-

[smtp-testing]
hostname = localhost
port = 25
queuepath = /tmp/test-mail-queue
xverp = True
processorthread = False
relay-address-prefix = human-resource-

This configuration option is used by

• The product that sends messages from a group⁴,
• The email processing script⁵, and
• This product.

Resources

• Code repository: https://github.com/groupserver/gs.profile.email.relay
• Questions and comments to http://groupserver.org/groups/development
• Report bugs at https://redmine.iopen.net/projects/groupserver

---

1. See the gs.group.list.sender product <https://github.com/groupserver/gs.group.list.sender>↩

2. See the gs.group.messages.add.smtp2gs product <https://github.com/groupserver/gs.group.messages.add.smtp2gs>↩

3. See the gs.group.messages.add.smtp2gs product <https://github.com/groupserver/gs.group.messages.add.smtp2gs>↩

4. See the gs.group.list.sender product <https://github.com/groupserver/gs.group.list.sender>↩

5. See the gs.group.messages.add.smtp2gs product <https://github.com/groupserver/gs.group.messages.add.smtp2gs>↩