Pigeonhole Sieve Extprograms Plugin
===================================

The "sieve_extprograms" plugin provides an extension to the Sieve filtering
language [http://www.sieve.info] adding new action commands for invoking a
predefined set of external programs. Messages can be piped to or filtered
through those programs and string data can be input to and retrieved from those
programs. To mitigate the security concerns, the external programs cannot be
chosen arbitrarily; the available programs are restricted through administrator
configuration.

This plugin is only available for <Pigeonhole.txt> v0.3 and beyond (available
for Dovecot v2.1). This an evolution of the <Pipe plugin>
[Pigeonhole.Sieve.Plugins.Pipe.txt] for Pigeonhole v0.2 and now provides the
"filter" and "execute" commands (and corresponding extensions) in addition to
the "pipe" command that was provided earlier by the Pipe plugin.

Getting the sources
-------------------

Currently, the sources of the sieve_extprograms plugin are not released, but
you can get them from the the Mercurial repository:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
hg clone http://hg.rename-it.nl/pigeonhole-0.3-sieve-extprograms/
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Compiling
---------

If you downloaded the sources of this plugin using Mercurial, you will need to
execute './autogen.sh' first to build the automake structure in your source
tree. This process requires autotools and libtool to be installed.

If you installed Dovecot from sources, the plugin's configure script should be
able to find the installed 'dovecot-config' automatically, along with the
Pigeonhole development headers:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
./configure
make
sudo make install
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

If this doesn't work, you can use '--with-dovecot=<path>' configure option,
where the path points to a directory containing 'dovecot-config' file. This can
point to an installed file:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
./configure --with-dovecot=/usr/local/lib/dovecot
make
sudo make install
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The above example should also find the necessary Pigeonhole development headers
implicitly. You can also compile by pointing to compiled Dovecot and Pigeonhole
source trees:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
./configure --with-dovecot=../dovecot-2.1.0/
--with-pigeonhole=../dovecot-2.1-pigeonhole-0.3.0
make
sudo make install
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Configuration
-------------

This package builds and installs the sieve_extprograms plugin for Pigeonhole
Sieve. The plugin is activated by adding it to the sieve_plugins setting:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
sieve_plugins = sieve_extprograms
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

This plugin registers the 'vnd.dovecot.pipe', 'vnd.dovecot.filter' and
'vnd.dovecot.execute' extensions with the Sieve interpreter. However, these
extensions are not enabled by default and thus need to be enabled explicitly.
It is recommended to restrict the use of these extensions to global context by
adding these to the 'sieve_global_extensions' setting. If personal user scripts
also need to directly access external programs, the extensions need to be added
to the 'sieve_extensions' setting.

The commands introduced by the Sieve language extensions in this plugin can
directly pipe a message or string data to an external program (typically a
shell script) by forking a new process. Alternatively, these can connect to a
unix socket behind which a Dovecot script service is listening to start the
external program, e.g. to execute as a different user or for added security.

The program name specified for the new Sieve 'pipe', 'filter' and 'execute'
commands is used to find the program or socket in a configured directory.
Separate directories are specified for the sockets and the directly executed
binaries. The socket directory is searched first. Since the use of "/" in
program names is prohibited, it is not possible to build a hierarchical
structure.

Directly forked programs are executed with a limited set of environment
variables:'HOME', 'USER', 'SENDER', 'RECIPIENT' and 'ORIG_RECIPIENT'. Programs
executed through the script-pipe socket service currently have no environment
set at all.

If a shell script is expected to read a message or string data, it must fully
read the provided input until the data ends with EOF, otherwise the Sieve
action invoking the program will fail. The action will also fail when the shell
script returns a nonzero exit code. Standard output is available for returning
a message (for the filter command) or string data (for the execute command) to
the Sieve interpreter. Standard error is written to the LDA log file.

The three extensions introduced by this plugin - 'vnd.dovecot.pipe',
'vnd.dovecot.filter' and 'vnd.dovecot.pipe' - each have separate but similar
configuration. The following configuration settings are used, for which
"<extension>" in the setting name is replaced by either 'pipe', 'filter' or
'execute' depending on which extension is being configured:

sieve_<extension>_socket_dir = :
  Points to a directory relative to the Dovecot base_dir where the plugin looks
  for script service sockets.

sieve_<extension>_bin_dir = :
  Points to a directory where the plugin looks for programs (shell scripts) to
  execute directly and pipe messages to.

Example 1: socket service for "pipe" and "execute"
--------------------------------------------------

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
plugin {
  sieve = ~/.dovecot.sieve

  sieve_plugins = sieve_extprograms
  sieve_global_extensions = +vnd.dovecot.pipe +vnd.dovecot.execute

  # pipe sockets in /var/run/dovecot/sieve-pipe
  sieve_pipe_socket_dir = sieve-pipe

  # execute sockets in /var/run/dovecot/sieve-execute
  sieve_execute_socket_dir = sieve-execute
}

service sieve-pipe-script {
  # This script is executed for each service connection
  executable = script /usr/lib/dovecot/sieve-extprograms/sieve-pipe-action.sh

  # use some unprivileged user for execution
  user = dovenull

  # socket name is program-name in Sieve (without sieve-pipe/ prefix)
  unix_listener sieve-pipe/sieve-pipe-script {
  }
}

service sieve-execute-action {
  # This script is executed for each service connection
  executable = script
/usr/lib/dovecot/sieve-extprograms/sieve-execute-action.sh

  # use some unprivileged user for execution
  user = dovenull

  # socket name is program-name in Sieve (without sieve-execute/ prefix)
  unix_listener sieve-execute/sieve-execute-action {
  }
}
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Example 2: direct execution for "pipe" and "filter"
---------------------------------------------------

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
plugin {
  sieve = ~/.dovecot.sieve

  sieve_plugins = sieve_extprograms
  sieve_global_extensions = +vnd.dovecot.pipe +vnd.dovecot.filter

  # This directory contains the scripts that are available for the pipe
command.
  sieve_pipe_bin_dir = /usr/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe

  # This directory contains the scripts that are available for the filter
  # command.
  sieve_filter_bin_dir = /usr/lib/dovecot/sieve-filter
}
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Usage
-----

Read the specification
[http://hg.rename-it.nl/pigeonhole-0.3-sieve-extprograms/raw-file/tip/doc/rfc/spec-bosch-sieve-extprograms.txt]
for detailed information on how to use the new language extensions.

(This file was created from the wiki on 2012-07-03 04:42)
