13.5.3.1 Conversion Channel Information Flow

The flow of information is as follows: a message containing body parts comes into the conversion channel. The conversion channel parses the message, and processes the parts one by one. The conversion channel then qualifies the body part, that is, it determines if it should be processed or not by comparing its MIME header lines to the qualifying parameters (Table 13–6). If the body part qualifies, the conversion processing commences.

If MIME or body part information is to be passed to the conversion script, it is stored in an environmental variable (13.5.3.2 To Use Conversion Channel Environmental Variables) as specified by information passing parameters (Table 13–6).

At this point, an action specified by an action parameter, (Table 13–6)is taken on the body part. Typically the action is that the body part be deleted or that it be passed to a program wrapped in a script. The script processes the body part and then sends it back to the conversion channel for reassembling into the post-processed message. The script can also send information to the conversion channel by using the conversion channel output options (Table 13–4). This can be information such as new MIME header lines to add to the output body part, error text to be returned to the message sender, or special directives instructing the MTA to initiate some action such as bounce, delete, or hold a message.

Finally, the conversion channel replaces the header lines for the output body part as specified by the output parameters (Table 13–6).