Note: of course everyone is welcome to look at this page. However, the information contained here is very technical and is useful to moderators only.

Setting up necessary programs

PGP

PGP is a general purpose encryption utility. It uses so called public key cryptography, when information encrypted by a person's public key can only be decrypted by someone possessing the private key.

Moderation software uses PGP to ensure security of transmission of articles between algebra.com and human moderators. Moderators will be given public key of the moderation system, with the private key residing in scrm@algebra.com account. Potential crackers might want to know that No sensitive or any other data is permanently encrypted with this key and that it is used for transmission of articles only.

Moderators must ensure that they do not divulge the public key: possession of such public key is technically equivalent to privileges of a moderator. Moderators, please issue the following command immediately after you add the SCRM public key to your keyring:

  chmod 700 $HOME/.pgp
Moderators need not be experts in using PGP, and you can forget about it after you've set it up: it will be used by moderation scripts internally.

Click here to get info where to get PGP, users' guide, etc.

Your Goal:

procmail

Procmail is a Unix mail processing package that will allow human moderators to separate their incoming mail from submissions to SCRM intended for their screening.

You can find procmail at ftp://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/packages/procmail/procmail.tar.gz

Procmail has documentation that you can view with man command, or with nroff. There is a number of things that you can do with procmail, but the core of what I want from you is very simple.

WARNING: please make sure that after you install procmail and create $HOME/.forward file you are able to receive mail. PLEASE SEND A TEST MAIL TO YOURSELF.

Compile procmail now

Go to the directory with procmail sources, and view README and INSTALL files. Follow instructions there.

Create $HOME/.procmailrc file

Execute these Unix commands (you can cut and paste it): 

mkdir $HOME/Mail
chmod 700 $HOME/Mail

cat > $HOME/.procmailrc << _EOB_
# Please check if all the paths in PATH are reachable, remove the ones that
# are not.

PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb:/bin:/usr/local/bin:.
MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail      # You'd better make sure it exists
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/mbox
LOGFILE=$MAILDIR/from
LOCKFILE=$HOME/.lockmail

:0                              # Messages for moderation
* ^X-Moderate-For: soc\.culture\.russian\.moderated
$MAILDIR/scrm.incoming          # go to $HOME/Mail/scrm.incoming


# Anything that has not been delivered by now will go to $DEFAULT
# using LOCKFILE=$DEFAULT$LOCKEXT

_EOB_
Edit file $HOME/.procmailrc and make sure that all elements of path exist. Note that after you install .forward file (not yet!) all mail will NOT be delivered to your system mailbox, but will go to file $HOME/Mail/mbox.

Create $HOME/.forward file

Execute this Unix command (you can cut and paste it): 

cat > $HOME/.forward << _EOB_
"|IFS=' ' && exec /path/to/procmail -f- || exit 75 # yourusername"
_EOB_
Note: you should replace /path/to/procmail with the actual path to the procmail binary.

You may want to edit your .profile or .login file (depending on your shell) and set MAIL environment variable to me $HOME/Mail/mbox. 


Bourne shell: 

  MAIL=$HOME/Mail/mbox
  export MAIL

C shell

  setenv MAIL $HOME/Mail/mbox
Immediately after that, make sure that you can receive email: send a test email to yourself: 
  echo http://www.wetware.com/mlegare/winnersk96.html | mail `whoami`
and make sure you receive it. If you do not, it means that others cannot send email to you! Check contents of file $HOME/Mail/mbox. If something does not work, it is a fairly urgent matter and you can give me a call at home, but try to do your part first.

Check both .forward and .procmailrc and make sure that all file names point to correct files.

Get my Scripts

AFTER you installed PGP and procmail, you can take two scripts: approve and reject. Grab text from this link and save it to file `approve'. Then grab file from this link and save it to file `reject'. Do NOT forget to make both files executable.

Get Internal Traffic Key

Ask me by email to send you Internal Traffic Key. Please send me your public PGP key so that I can send it encrypted. Add this key to your public keyring and DO NOT SHOW IT TO ANYONE!!!