Procmail FAQ

This directory is the home of a Procmail FAQ.

As most actively maintained documents, it is always more or less "under construction".

There are several mirrors of this site. Please use the mirrors if you can.

North America: http://mirror.ncsa.uiuc.edu/procmail-faq/; http://www.zer0.org/procmail/; http://www.moongroup.com/docs/procmail/; http://www.linuxguru.com/docs/faq/procmail/
Europe: http://www.xs4all.nl/~sister/mirror/procmail/

The URL of the original site is http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/

Here is a listing of the pages you'll find here:

Procmail FAQ

"Main Course"

The FAQ itself aka the Procmail Mini-FAQ
A link page with pointers to various other Procmail resources
A quick reference (strictly beta; doesn't use tables anymore)

Procmail mailing list resources

Stuff related to the Procmail mailing list at Aachen.

Achim Bohnet's searchable archive of the Procmail mailing list (external link)
Subscription instructions are included in the periodic Mini-FAQ pointer posting

The list is run on the SmartList system and the help files here are mostly the default SmartList ones.

Incidentally, SmartList just happens to run on top of Procmail.

Files from the Procmail distribution

These files are here for easy reference, but might not be the newest versions. The autoritative source is http://www.procmail.org/ which also has e.g. a complete unpacked source tree for Procmail and SmartList.

Local copies of the following files are kept here:

The "original" Procmail FAQ by Procmail's author, Stephen van den Berg. This "original FAQ" is still maintained as part of the Procmail distribution, but targets a somewhat different audience than the mini-FAQ. (The HTML version here is not "official"; there is also a copy of the text-only original from the 3.11pre7 distribution.)
The manual pages from v3.11pre7 (crude col -b format); procmail(1), procmailex(5), procmailrc(5), procmailsc(5), formail(1), and lockfile(1)
Please note that some things in the man pages are site-specific. You really should attempt to get the man pages installed locally.
Various other documents from the Procmail distribution;
- the README file
- the HISTORY file
- the INSTALL notes
- the administrative notes in examples/advanced

Revision history for these pages

As indicated, this is work in progress. I very much appreciate any kind of feedback on this (broken links, broken examples, broken English ... or anything else you wish to comment on).

Mail me if you wish to contribute!

Here's where to download Procmail:

http://www.procmail.org/

(make sure to get the latest stable version, which is still 3.13.1. There are some minor bugs in 3.14. There should be a 3.14.1 forthcoming shortly).

There is also a list of mirrors on the Links page.

Wanted / To Do

If you have material which matches any of the following, or think you can help implement any of these ideas, please contact me.

For the FAQ

What to remove :-)
Break out a "cookbook" with interesting recipes on its own page
More known bugs and gotchas
Perhaps not for this FAQ, but would be useful to have somewhere: Discussion of Tower of Babel terminology for resending a message ("bounce" vs. "forward" vs. "resend" vs. "regurgitate" ...)
Mail folder formats should perhaps also be separated out into its own little FAQ or something
Move more newbie-level material (e.g. efficiency tips) towards beginning

For the Links page

Does anybody keep a surfable copy of the Best Of archive on-line? (This is nominally available at http://members.xoom.com/procmail/best-of-procmail-list/ but not very surfable, frankly speaking.)
Better newbie links
(Is there anyplace better than Yahoo or dmoz.org to start looking? There must be introductory texts about shell programming and regular expressions that are actually not bad and/or tied to a very specific environment)
Is there anything for converting the rahul.net patterns to Procmail format?
Clarify for myself what the distinction between "newbie" and "rocket science" really should be
"Virtual Best Of" with links to good articles in the archives? Actually the "Pearls" section is a good start.

For the Quick Reference Guide

Definition of deliveredness
All the possible sicko scoring variations (x^y < number, x^y ! ? pipeline, etc)
What characters need to be backslash-escaped (simple to do, but where do I put it :-)
How Procmail's regex operators differ from Perl's and egrep's
Note that timeouts are lower bounds
Proofread && check: LOGFILE, TRAP, $*
Common mistakes and how to avoid them (kind of based on some stuff in the FAQ and on stuff people often misunderstand)

For the author

A good Regular Expression FAQ anywhere that I could link to?
Time to do a good lint for Procmail
(Alan Stebbens's library contains a simple one. Unfortunately, it's too simple to be of real use. IMHO, of course.)
Grammer && fakt chekr

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