Things look quiet here. But I've been doing a lot of blogging at
dan.langille.org because I prefer WordPress now.
Not all my posts there are FreeBSD related.
I am in the midst of migrating The FreeBSD Diary over to WordPress
(and you can read about that here).
Once the migration is completed, I'll move the FreeBSD posts into the
new FreeBSD Diary website.
procmail is a tool for manipulating mail. If you like to
sort your incoming mail into various folders/directories, procmail can do that
for you. If you want to cut down on the spam, procmail can help with that.
Basically, if you can write a rule for it, procmail can do it.
I wanted
to sort incoming mail for a list archive box. Mail for one list had to go to one
mailbox and from another list for another mailbox. This seemed pretty easy to do
with procmail.
Don't do a make clean until after you grab the examples during the configuration later
in this article
Introducing .forward
I'll give you a very simple example. procmail is often
invoked from your .forward file. .forward resides within your
home directory. It is used by sendmail, and
other mail transport agents (MTAs). .forward, if it exists, is used each
time a new message is delivered to that user. The conventional use of .forward
is for redirecting mail. See man
forward for more information.
procmail makes use of .forward to
process your mail according to the rules you specify within .procmailrc.
Here is what I put in ~/.forward:
[dan@set:/home/dan] # more .forward
"|exec /usr/local/bin/procmail || exit 75"
The above is taken from man procmail, in the NOTES section. Be sure to include
the quotes.
procmail rules
Here is the example rule set I'm using. This example was taken from
Your procmail version may vary so the above directory may differ on your box.
[root@set:/home/dan] # more .procmailrc
# 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 # Anything from Henry
* ^From.*henry
henries # will go to $MAILDIR/henries
:0 # anything from cvs-all mailing list
* ^Sender.*owner-cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG
lists/cvs-all # will go into my archive
# Anything that has not been delivered by now will go to $DEFAULT
# using LOCKFILE=$DEFAULT$LOCKEXT
Be sure to create the mail directory indicated above:
mkdir ~/mail
That should be about it. Try it and see.
Testing
Sometimes it can be difficult to test your procmail rules. You can't
always wait for a mail message which meets your test conditions. Fortunately, there
is another way. Take a message, including the headers, and copy it to a file.
Then pipe the contents of that file to procmail. I found the testbench as
described at Timo's procmail tips and
recipes very helpful.
Clean up
Remember to do a make clean!
Recipes31 December 2000
Gill wrote in with this recipe for mailing lists. It was actually
written by Neil Blakey-Milner.
I am sure you will get hounded with people suggesting thier own procmailscripts, but
this one came to me by way of the -questions list and it is the niftiest one i've ever
seen and it works perfectly. It is useful for
all of the FreeBSD lists:
# From: Neil Blakey-Milner
# Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
# Subject: Re: Procmail recipes for fbsd lists
