EMIL version 2 TUTORIAL

# TUTORIAL FOR EMIL VERSION 2.1

Written by Martin Wendel, ITS, Uppsala university. Martin.Wendel@its.uu.se

## CONFIGURATION OF EMIL.CF

When you've set up your sendmail to use Emil you need to configure Emil to do the right conversions. This is done in emil.cf. Here follows an overview on how to configure emil.cf. For a detailed description of the syntax of emil.cf check the man page.

The emil.cf supplied with the distribution contains a few different conversion groups. Create your own groups if the ones provided does not suit your needs.

Once you've got your groups set up, you define members of your groups. A member is selected by <recipient>, <sender> and <recipient host>, all provided by arguments to Emil.

The simplest way to define members is to consider your message format situation compared to the rest of the world. If a single message format is what you want to send to most of the rest of the world, define this message format as the default conversion group. Then make exceptions for all or part of your local environment and for those remote sites that also are exceptions to the default.

You should always send MIME formatted messages to sites you're not familiar with. MIME should be regarded as default on the Internet.

An example: Your site don't want MIME formatted messages but the rest of the world does. Start by defining an apropriate conversion group for your local site. If this group is called local_group and the MIME group is called mime_group, edit emil.cf according to:

    member	local_group	:	*.yourdomain,	*,	*,
    				*@yourdomain,	*,	*;
    member	mime_group	:	*,		*,	*;

Remember that emil only finds the first match, put the default match at the bottom. If you need more than two message groups just add the member fields according to above.

There is one thing that might need explaination with this: If Emil is to convert charset of non-MIME messages, there is most of the time no specification of the source charset defined in the message itself. If these messages come from your own site, the charset can be extracted from emil.cf by reversing the member lookup. That is, when Emil receives a message it tries to determine the source charset by reversing sender and recipient when performing a member lookup. If you are the sender, Emil will check what charset you would want if the message were to be received by you. Any charset definitions in the message itself that is recognized by Emil will override the result from the reverse lookup.

Now you should be ready to implement message conversion at your site.
Have fun!