MARP (Mundungus Autoresponder Requests a Password) is a challenge and
response style, mail filter created with procmail.

Addresses of known senders are kept in a whitelist and the system is
totally transparent to them.  Unknown senders receive an email asking
them to respond with a password.  This response will cause their
address to be added to the whitelist.

MARP tries not to respond to daemons and mailing lists if they can
be identified as such.

For users with <anything>@example.com style addresses, there is a
passthrough list of recipient addresses.  This is useful for
interaction with websites or similar from whence an email will be sent
but the sender address is unknown.  Adding suppliername@example.com to
the passthough list will cause the sender's address of any mail sent to
that address to be added to the whitelist.

When initating an email dialogue, it is, of course, polite to add the
recipient to the whitelist.  To facilitate this, there is a sending
filter for use with Pine that adds recipient addresses to the
whitelist.

Mail that has elicited a response from MARP are stored in a temporary
mailbox as are responses from mailer daemons that result from receiving
emails with problematic return addresses.  There are shell scripts to
clean up this detritus suitable for running from a crontab.

Autoresponses are put into the Sendmail queue rather than being sent
immediately, as a defense against mail loops.



QUICK START

All operations should be done as a user not as root.

1. Unpack the file

tar -xzf  marp-1.0.0.tar.gz


2. Change to the install directory

cd ./marp-1.0.0


3. Create userdata.rc and userdata.sh from information gleaned from the
   computer.

make userdata


4. If neccessary, edit the user data files, userdata.rc and
   userdata.sh, with a text editor.  Examples are contained in the
   files.


5. Install MARP.  This copies files to the ~/.procmail/marp directory.

make install


6. Add friends and family to the whitelist.  The whitelist is a list
   of email addresses, for example:

This file should not be empty
marp@mundungus.org
tuna@purse-seine.net

   When editing this file manually, ensure that it ends with a blank
   line.


6. Add a call to the marp.rc recipes near or at the end of the
   ~/.procmailrc file


INCLUDERC=${HOME}/.procmail/marp/marp.rc


7. Configure Pine to use the sending filter

~/.procmail/marp/marpAddRecipientsToWhiteList _TMPFILE_ _RECIPIENTS_ 


8. Add a crontab entry

# run at 04:23 each day 23 4 * * *
$HOME/.procmail/marp/marp.cron



DEPENDENCIES

Procmail, formail, sendmail and various utilities such as awk, grep,
tr and head.



HOW IT WORKS.

To be written.




Alan Clifford can be contacted at marp@mundungus.org.  At the time of
writing, this address is in my Marp passthrough list.


$Id: README,v 1.6 2003/06/14 23:44:54 alan Exp alan $
