Anonymous mail

[Steve Minneman]

In article <5357 at cbrma.UUCP> ask at cbrma.UUCP (A.S.Kamlet(Art)) writes:
>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

Here's an even simplier suggestion -- write a simple script like the following
which temporarily changes the environmental variables and then sets them
back.  The following works under system 5.  It may have to be modified
for BSD:
------------------------------cut here and save-------------------------------

SAVE1='LOGNAME'
SAVE2='NAME'
LOGNAME="proper\!unknown\!poster"
NAME="I. A. M. Anonymous"
export LOGNAME NAME
mailx $1
LOGNAME='SAVE1'
NAME='SAVE2'
export LOGNAME NAME


-- 
---

		Steven A. Minneman (Fujitsu America Inc, San Jose, Ca)
		!seismo!amdahl!fai!stevem  or !ihnp4!pesnta!fai!stevem

The best government is no government at all.