From: era eriksson To: procmail@informatik.rwth-aachen.de Bcc: reriksso@cc.helsinki.fi Subject: Procmail FAQ and Links pointer (pre-faq or pre-inf) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,news.admin.net-abuse.email Supersedes: Followup-To: poster Organization: People Who Are Not Old Enough For Unix (Honorary Member Emeritus) X-Pgp-Fingerprint: 85 40 A8 84 71 26 2C ED 15 CF 22 82 91 01 D4 42 Archive-name-to-be: mail/procmail-faq-pointer URL: http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/ Last-modified: Tue Jul 4 16:52:36 EEST 2000 Posting-frequency: Every 11 days Subscription and unsubscription instructions for the Procmail mailing list are included below. Newsflash / Nov 23 1999: Procmail 3.14 is out. The Procmail Mini-FAQ and its companion Procmail Links page are available at the following locations: Procmail Mini-FAQ: Procmail Links: Please view the Table of Contents for the FAQ near the end of this posting. If you have a question about Procmail, you should hopefully find it there. The following mirror sites are available: North America Europe Please use one of the mirrors if you can. Other useful on-line resources related to Procmail include -- Procmail and SmartList Home Page -- Searchable archive of the Procmail Mailing List -- Sean's Unsubscribe FAQ for the Alphabet Challenged -- SmartList FAQ, now maintained by Peter Hartzler The Links page, of course, has links to lots more. If you would like to receive the FAQ by electronic mail, send a message with the words "send mini-faq.txt" (sans quotation marks) in the Subject: header to the address The Links page is not very useful if you do not have WWW access. You can receive the HTML version by e-mail, though; use the Subject line "send links.html" instead. The HTML version of the FAQ can be retreived with the Subject: send mini-faq.html If you can't receive large messages, you can receive the text version of the mini-FAQ in parts by requesting "mini-faq/parts" instead of "mini-faq.txt". My current plan is to send this out every 11 days and see how people react. If nobody reacts in any way, I will probably continue to send it out this way, and/or ultimately seek news.answers approval for this notice. /* era */ Changes to the FAQ since the previous announcement ================================================== The following change log details recent developments since this announcement was last posted. The WWW version has a full change log which goes further back. Mini-Faq: date: 2000/07/04 New mirror at http://www.linuxguru.com/docs/faq/procmail/ Links: Quickref: date: 1999/11/28 Yikes -- character class trick example in regex section was wrong. Thanks to Rejo Zenger and Philip Guenther for the discussion on the list. date: 1999/08/06 Some minor tweaks, including a note that the options are not described here. (Anybody wanna volunteer?) How to subscribe/unsubscribe ============================ If you would like to subscribe to the Procmail mailing list, send a message containing the word "subscribe" (without the quotes (and without this parenthetical remark, too :^)) in the Subject: field to . Please spend an additional second to check the spelling of that single word before you send off the message. To unsubscribe from the list, change "subscribe" to "unsubscribe". This word seems even harder to spell right than the other one. Note that these messages should not be sent to the list address which is what you might have in your address book or similar -- mail to that address will be distributed to all the list subscribers (and make some of them very upset, if it's not about Procmail.) There is also a SmartList list and various special lists related to Procmail and SmartList. There is a web page with detailed information at and mirrors. The FAQ contains some friendly comments on netiquette. Please read them before posting to the list. The list robot is not very tolerant of mail errors and will automatically unsubscribe you if it gets many bounces from your address. Just subscribe yourself again if this happens. (You should expect to see several message from the list per day.) I have no influence over how the list is operated. If you thought these instructions were too complicated, the Unsubscribe FAQ is definitely not for you. (See URL above.) Abridged Table of Contents for the FAQ ====================================== This is a short (abridged) listing of the contents of the FAQ. Hopefully, you should find your question here, and its answer in the FAQ. * What is Procmail? -- Description, availability, and installation + Where do I start? + Is there a Procmail for Windows NT? + How can I run an arbitrary Perl or shell script on all or selected incoming mail? + How to get answers to questions which this FAQ doesn't cover + Why am I getting spam from the Procmail list server? + I subscribed to the Procmail-L mailing list earlier but haven't seen any messages for a while. Did the listserv crash? * How do I use wildcards in Procmail? Explain file locking, please. ... and other syntax issues, including: + How can I forward a message but leave a copy on the server? (Also how do I not leave a copy on the server.) + How about saving to multiple folders? + How can I forward to many addresses? + Generally speaking, how do I do more than one action on a message? + I get these procmail: Skipped "(something)" errors ... + I can't get the backup example to work? + How do I backup into a file instead of a directory? + I know how to forward a message, but how do I forward a modified message? + How can I change the contents of a message but otherwise proceed through my .procmailrc as usual? + I want to pass some information to a script I run from within Procmail + What's a "folder"? + What's a spool file? + What does the second colon in :0: mean? + What does "Couldn't determine implicit lockfile" mean? + Where are files created / stored? + What's this From_ header? + How can I do a logical OR of two conditions? + Can I list several actions under a common condition? How? + How can I test the value of a variable or argument? + Efficiency tips + I'm having a hard time with \/ + Why shouldn't I use the * wildcard? + Short example recipes sprinkled throughout the text * Help, I get this error message ... -- Troubleshooting tips Some highlights: + An example debugging .rc file + Known bugs, common gotchas, and funny quirks ... including, but not limited to: o Memory handling with huge messages / on FreeBSD o Upgrade to 3.12/3.13 breaks Procmail on systems with group-writable directories (e.g. Red Hat Linux) o The regex engine is not egrep compatible o There is no ^FROM macro o Backslash parsing is sometimes counter-intuitive o Always include a SHELL= definition + Getting the thing to run in the first place + What goes in your .forward file + Yikes! Where did my mail go?? + Why is Procmail writing to a file called *? + Why is Procmail writing to the console? Can I stop that? + What are these fields that get written to the log? + Why does formail fail when looking for duplicates? + What's this about "rescued data" from a filtering recipe? + Why won't biff work right for my own folders? + How do I get Procmail and Netscape to cooperate? * How do I ...? -- Running Procmail + ... match on the BCC header? + ... implement a virtual domain? Or, how can I let several local users share the same POP mailbox at the upstream? Or, what is the most frequently made wrong assumption about mail delivery? + ... figure out who to Cc: when there are several recipients? + ... run Procmail on a file of messages? + ... do different actions depending on the time of day? + ... trim down the From: field to just user@host? + ... know what EXITCODE to use? + ... prevent my .forward from showing in bounces? + ... extract (or kill) MIME parts from messages? + ... write a "vacation" program? An autoresponder? * Where can I learn more? -- A small links collection * Appendices + Appendix A -- Folder Formats + Appendix B -- Figuring Out the Mail Flow + Appendix C -- Procmail Mirrors