Any way to filter email dynamically by taking 'from' and matching it with database ? (Using procmail or Virtualmin or Webmin) - postgresql

Question

I basically want to check the incoming 'From' in the email received and then either
Keep it and make it deliver to the intended mailbox if the email matches a Specified MySQL/PostgreSQL
Database User (eg. select email from users where exists ('from email address') )
If the 'From' address is blank or it is not found in the database, the email should be discarded
Any way I can achieve this before the e-mail is delivered to the intended mailbox?
I am using Procmail + Virtualmin + Webmin + PostgreSQL
PS: I want to apply this filter not to the wole server but to some specified mailboxes/users (i'm assuming 1 user = 1 mailbox here)

Answer 1

Procmail can easily run an external command in a condition and react to its exit status. How exactly to make your particular SQL client set its exit code will depend on which one you are using; perhaps its man page will reveal an option to make it exit with an error when a query produces an empty result set, for example? Or else write a shell wrapper to look for empty output.
A complication is that Procmail (or rather, the companion utility formail) can easily extract a string from e.g. the From: header; but you want to reduce this to just the email terminus. This is a common enough task that it's easy to find a canned solution - generate a reply and then extract the To: address (sic!) from that.
FROM=`formail -rtzxTo:`
:0
* FROM ?? ^(one#example\.com|two#site\.example\.net|third#example\.org)$
{
:0
* ? yoursql --no-headers --fail-if-empty-result \
--batch --query databasename \
--eval "select yada yada where address = '$FROM'"
{ }
:0E
/dev/null
}
The first condition examines the variable and succeeds if it contains one of the addresses (my original answer simply had the regex . which matches if the string contains at least one character, any character; I'm not convinced this is actually necessary or useful; there should be no way for From: to be empty). If it is true, Procmail enters the braces; if not, they will be skipped.
The first recipe inside the braces runs an external command and examines its exit code. I'm imagining your SQL client is called yoursql and that it has options to turn off human-friendly formatting (table headers etc) and for running a query directly from the command line on a specific database. We use double quotes so that the shell will interpolate the variable FROM before running this command (maybe there is a safer way to pass string variables which might contain SQL injection attempts with something like --variable from="$FROM" and then use that variable in the query? See below.)
If there is no option to directly set the exit code, but you can make sure standard output is completely empty in the case of no result, piping the command to grep -q . will produce the correct exit code. In a more complex case, maybe write a simple Awk script to identify an empty result set and set its exit status accordingly.
Scraping together information from
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-psql.html,
How do you use script variables in psql?,
Making an empty output from psql,
and from your question, I end up with the following attempt to implement this in psql; but as I don't have a Postgres instance to test with, or any information about your database schema, this is still approximate at best.
* ? psql --no-align --tuples-only --quiet \
--dbname=databasename --username=something --no-password \
--variable=from="$FROM" \
--command="select email from users where email = :'from'" \
| grep -q .
(We still can't use single quotes around the SQL query, to completely protect it from the shell, because Postgres insists on single quotes around :'from', and the shell offers no facility for embedding literal single quotes inside single quotes.)
The surrounding Procmail code should be reasonably self-explanatory, but here goes anyway. In the first recipe inside the braces, if the condition is true, the empty braces in its action line are a no-op; the E flag on the next recipe is a condition which is true only if any of the conditions on the previous recipe failed. This is a common idiom to avoid having to use a lot of negations; perhaps look up "de Morgan's law". The net result is that we discard the message by delivering it to /dev/null if either condition in the first recipe failed; and otherwise, we simply pass it through, and Procmail will eventually deliver it to its default destination.
The recipe was refactored in response to updates to your question; perhaps now it would make more sense to just negate the exit code from psql with a ! in front:
FROM=`formail -rtzxTo:`
:0
* FROM ?? ^(one#example\.com|two#site\.example\.net|third#example\.org)$
* ! ? psql --no-align --tuples-only --quiet \
--dbname=databasename --username=something --no-password \
--variable=from="$FROM" \
--command="select email from users where email = :'from'" \
| grep -q .
/dev/null
Tangentially, perhaps notice how Procmail's syntax exploits the fact that a leading ? or a doubled ?? are not valid in regular expressions. So the parser can unambiguously tell that these conditions are not regular expressions; they compare a variable to the regex after ??, or examine the exit status of an external command, respectively. There are a few other special conditions like this in Procmail; arguably, all of them are rather obscure.
Newcomers to shell scripting should also notice that each shell command pipeline has two distinct results: whatever is being printed on standard output, and, completely separate from that, an exit code which reveals whether or not the command completed successfully. (Conventionally, a zero exit status signals success, and anything else is an error. For example, the exit status from grep is 0 if it finds at least one match, 1 if it doesn't, and usually some other nonzero exit code if you passed in an invalid regular expression, or you don't have permission to read the input file, etc.)
For further details, perhaps see also http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/ which has an old "mini-FAQ" which covers several of the topics here, and a "quick reference" for looking up details of the syntax.
I'm not familiar with Virtualmin but https://docs.virtualmin.com/Webmin/PostgreSQL_Database_Server shows how to set up Postgres and as per https://docs.virtualmin.com/Webmin/Procmail_Mail_Filter I guess you will want to use the option to put this code in an include file.