procmail
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Re: mail to exmh gets misplaced with procmail

1995-11-01 18:57:13
Olly Stephens <olly(_at_)dylan(_dot_)zycad(_dot_)com> wrote:
In the exmh-users mailing list,
iskender(_at_)csla(_dot_)csl(_dot_)sri(_dot_)com (Iskender Agi) said:
|> page to handle bounced mail.

|> :0 w:
|> * ^FROM_MAILER
|> | rcvstore +PostMaster

My guess is that it's the following line (which accompanies all mail sent
on the exmh-users mailing list):

 Sender: exmh-mail-errors(_at_)parc(_dot_)xerox(_dot_)com

If you look at the expansion of procmail's FROM_MAILER, you'll notice
that it looks for the text "Mail" (case insensitive) in the sender
address.  For procmail 3.11pre4, the expansion is:

[...]

Of course, this is *really hideous* so my answer is only an educated guess.

You are correct.  The fact that it is indeed hideous is exactly why it
is hidden behind a macro (it can't really be fast and comprehensive without
getting hideous).

If I'm correct, you could avoid it by modifying your test to:

[...]

Of course, this is not 100% satisfactory as the FROM_MAILER shouldn't
produce false hits.

The ^FROM_MAILER and ^FROM_DAEMON macros have been carefully tuned in the
past five years.  In fact they do give off false matches, every now and then.
But this is far better than missing some that should have been matched.
The problem is that it can be made a bit more accurate at the expense of
speed and size.

The canonical way of dealing with false matches is to make sure that
recipes in the .procmailrc file are roughly in the following order:

1. Recipes that catch and file mailinglists.
2. Autoreply recipes.
3. Recipes that catch postmaster bounces.
4. Anything else (your default mailbox).

[Soren, this is FAQ material, I think]
-- 
Sincerely,                                                          
srb(_at_)cuci(_dot_)nl
           Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless).

The eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not re-curse!

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