Thanks good people for immediate and helpful replies to my query re mhonarc
and procmail. The syntax of my .procmailrc file was not correct for what I
wanted. I wanted to have procmail filter messages from a mailing list and save
them as a "mbox" style file for processing by MHonArc. Jim Goes
<goes(_at_)ursus(_dot_)jun(_dot_)alaska(_dot_)edu> clarified:
If Some-list is a directory, procmail will think it is supposed to save
individual mail files and auto-name them. If there is not a directory
named Some-list, procmail should treat it as a file (even create it if it
doesn't exist). It does when you use an absolute file name.
So I removed a directory named /home/me/Mail/Some-list/ and replaced it with
a file named /home/me/Mail/Some-list.mbox. I changed my .procmailrc file to
this:
:0
* ^To(_dot_)*some_list(_at_)world(_dot_)std(_dot_)com
/home/me/Mail/Some-list.mbox
and it works very nicely.
Jim Goes commented:
That way, the mhonarc command in the cron job only has to process one
mail file (much more efficient).
If I wanted to process a directory full of individual messages, I could have
used MhonArc thusly:
/usr/local/bin/mhonarc /home/me/Mail/Some-list/*
I was wrong to try:
/usr/local/bin/mhonarc /home/me/Mail/Some-list
This is what would go in the .procmailrc file to create a directory full of
messages:
:0
* ^To(_dot_)*some-list(_at_)world(_dot_)std(_dot_)com
Some-list/. # notice the /.
There's a third alternative. Ryan Tucker
<rtucker(_at_)crasher2(_dot_)ttgcitn(_dot_)com>
prefers to use mh do the storage. He says
[Use] mh's rcvstore utility, which is a LOT nicer about keeping
stuff in line.
And he supplied some .procmailrc examples but I was chicken to try it :-).
Eric D. Friedman <friedman(_at_)hydra(_dot_)acs(_dot_)uci(_dot_)edu> and Scott
Anguish
<sanguish(_at_)digifix(_dot_)com> were also very helpful. Thanks for your
patience with a
procmail newbie! Hopefully next time someone has this problem they'll find
this in the archives.
Daniel Kehoe
kehoe(_at_)fortuity(_dot_)com
* Fortuity Consulting, management services, consulting, and licensing
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