[Note: removed exmh-users mailing list from distribution of this thread;
it's pure procmail now]
srb(_at_)cuci(_dot_)nl (Stephen R. van den Berg) wrote:
|>
|> >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.
I didn't mean to imply that I was unhappy with its performance. Far from
it; I'm amazed it's possible to write a regexp that detects most mailer
styles. I guess this has been crafted over the years by a series of
"can it detect <format> without giving too many false detects" requests.
I guess the exmh-users list doesn't conform to list "standards". On
the bright side, this may change soon as the list is due to move
locations (the exmh author has moved but the list has yet to follow)
at which time it will hopefully be governed by a more "conformant"
list manager :-)
|> 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]
I think it may also be useful to add to the FAQ a readable description of
the various built-in macros (like ^FROM_MAILER). This would help people
understand their use and why it is/isn't catching mail messages they think
it shouldn't/should.
Olly
PS> Being a relatively new convert to procmail, I'm still in that "extremely
impressed" mode which will continue for every day that it correctly
sorts my mail :-)
I also love the speed of it; I used to use mailagent which is a very clever
perl program and did the job very well but had a good two minute start-up
overhead on my machine!!