> Well I've poured over everything I can find on procmail and sendmail for a
> little over a week now and I am just baffeled. I can send messages to
> users on this machine and sendmail and procmail will work together exactly
> like they should, but when I retreive mail from my isp with popclient
> nothing at all happens. No log file or any activity from procmail at all.
> Sendmail doesn't complain either. I've tried including the lines from the
> procmail man pages in the sendmail.cf file and also tried variations on
> them with no success. I had to get rid of the .forward file to even get
> procmail to work at all.
When you fetch mail from your ISP with "popclient", procmail doesn't get
involved at all. It can't. Your ISP's mailer system is receiving the
mail, via SMTP, and probably with Sendmail, but even that isn't a sure
thing.
Procmail is designed to be primarily used as part of the mail delivery
process on a Unix system. Since most Unix systems support Sendmail,
procmail has features which support its integration into Sendmail's
delivery mechanism: either using the .forward file, or as a replacement
for the local mail delivery program (by redefining Mlocal in sendmail.cf).
When you use popclient to "fetch" mail from your ISP, "popclient"
becomes the mail delivery process on your local system. So, instead of
integrating procmail into Sendmail's delivery process, you must
integrate procmail into popclient's mail delivery process.
I don't know anything about popclient itself, but, in order to integrate
procmail into popclient's mail delivery process, there must be a "hook"
(a flag, switch, variable, etc.) for you or your local system's manager
to set for overriding or redefining the local mail delivery process.
If popclient delivers the mail locally itself, and has no support for
programming an intervening mail filter, then the mail cannot be filtered
before delivery. In this case, you will have to perform mail fitering
*after* delivery, using procmail's '-m' option as a general mail filter.
This can be done using a crontab job, or a custom daemon which watches
for delivered mail (custom == one that you write yourself :^}).
The best thing is to determine whether or not popclient supports local
mail filtering, after "fetching" the mail from the popserver. If it
doesn't, then you may wish to contact your ISP, to see if they will
support SMTP instead of POP for delivery to their customers. This way,
you can run a sendmail to fetch your mail using SMTP instead of POP.
G'luck.
___________________________________________________________
Alan Stebbens <aks(_at_)sgi(_dot_)com> http://reality.sgi.com/aks