procmail
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Re: procmail and netscape

1997-05-02 15:30:00
Steve Jorgensen wrote:

        Hello..

        We have some users here that are using procmail, and
        have just switched over to using netscape as their
        mail reader.  Unfortunately, netscape only seems to
        think that there is only one mail spool per user.
        The way netscape handles mail is that is sucks all
        the mail out of the spool file, and adds some information
        to each message, and creates its own file in the user's
        Mail directory.  From there a user can create multiple
        mail file from their spool to categorize the information,
        but this has to be done by hand.

        If you try to have procmail do the categorization and just
        write to those mail files created by netscape, netscape
        gets confused about what has and hasn't been read previously,
        and forces the user to remark most (if not all) articles
        read again everytime they re-enter netscape.

        Is there any way to make these two systems go exist
        peacefully?  Ideally, it would be nice to tell
        netscape to watch several spool files and let it
        cache them all itself, then the two won't write to
        the same files.  However, I looked for a way to set
        this in netscape and am not having any luck..

I'm currently using this setup and find it works reasonably well.

Netscape rebuilds the summary file for the folder if you attempt to
access the folder after the contents have changed courtesy of procmail
having dropped another message in. (If folder sizes are kept small ie <
700 messages, the time delay is not too bad, although I'm running on a
DEC Alpha...).

The catch to ensuring that your reading/deleted status of messages is
retained seems to be performing a "Compress this folder" operation
-before- procmail can drop the next message into the folder you are
reading. Easy if there's little activity on that folder....

Cheers

        Mike.
-- 
 Mike de Laine                   email: Mike(_at_)Innosoft(_dot_)com
 Innosoft International, Inc.    WWW: http://www.innosoft.com 
 1050 Lakes Drive                Telephone: +1 818 919 3600     
 West Covina, CA  91790 USA      FAX:       +1 818 919 3614

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