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3. Preferences

While premail's default configuration is designed to be sufficient for the the most common cases, you may want to change some of the configuration options. This is done by adding lines to the preferences file.

The default location for the preferences file is ~/.premail/preferences, where ~ represents your home directory. The premail distribution comes with a skeleton preferences file, but it does not automatically copy it into the ~/.premail directory. You might choose to do that yourself, or you might create one from scratch.

The format of the preferences file is a sequence of lines such as the following:

$config{'option'} = 'value';

All other lines (including those beginning with #) are considered to be comments and are ignored. Here's a typical preferences file (actually, the one on my home machine):

$config{'logfile'} = '/home/raph/premail/log';
$config{'debug'} = 'chvl';
$config{'movemail'} = '/home/raph/bin/movehome';
$config{'ripem'} = '/home/raph/install/ripem/main/ripem';
$config{'pgp'} = '/usr/local/bin/pgp';

As you can see, a major use for the preferences file is to specify full pathnames for the helper programs. In addition, I've set it up to produce a full log, which I find useful, because I'm constantly tracking down bugs :-)

Here's a table of all the configuration options, their defaults, and a very brief description. More complete descriptions are found in the preferences file included in the premail distribution.

pgp (default pgp)

The location of the PGP executable.

sendmail (default /usr/lib/sendmail)

The location of the sendmail executable.

mixmaster (default mixmaster)

The location of the Mixmaster executable (useful for more secure anonymous mail).

movemail (default movemail)

The location of the movemail executable (useful for integrating Netscape 3.0).

ripem (default ripem)

The location of the ripem executable (needed for S/MIME messages).

mossbin

The directory containing the TIS/MOSS executables (needed for MOSS messages).

post (default post)

The location of the MH post executable (needed for MH integration).

geturl (default )

A command for getting files from the Web. Use ``lynx -source'' if behind a firewall.

dead-letter (default ~/dead.letter)

The file where premail stores undeliverable mail.

logfile

The location where premail stores its log, if the l debug flag is set.

storefile

If set, the location where premail stores outgoing mail, instead of calling sendmail.

tmpdir (default /tmp)

Where premail stores its temporary files.

charset (default iso-8859-1)

The default charset for outgoing 8-bit messages.

encrypt (default yes)

Set to blank to disable PGP encryption to remailers.

ack

If set, nymservers will send acknowledgements for all outgoing mail.

extrablank

If set, premail adds an extra blank on remailer messages. Useful if behind a broken mail proxy.

debug

Debugging flags (see section debugging).

signuser

The user id of the default PGP secret key used to sign messages.

default-reply-to

Adds a Reply-To: header field with this address when sending anonymous e-mail.

addresses (default ~/.premail/addresses)

The file containing your addresses.

rlist (default ~/.premail/rlist)

The file where premail stores the remailer list.

pubring (default ~/.premail/pubring.pgp)

The file where premail stores the public keyring for the remailers.

premail-secrets-pgp (default ~/.premail/secrets.pgp)

The file where premail stores the encrypted secrets file.

premail-secrets (default /tmp/premail-secrets.$<)

The location of your secrets file

rlist-url (default http://kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu/rlist)

The URL for the remailer list.

pubring-url (default http://kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu/pubring.pgp)

The URL for the remailer public keyring.

type2-list-url (default http://www.jpunix.com/type2.html)

The URL for the Mixmaster type2 list.

pubring-mix-url (default http://www.jpunix.com/pubring.html)

The URL for the Mixmaster pubring.


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