wotan(_at_)netcom(_dot_)com wrote about his mail on patriot.net,
| The specific problem is that either no "From " is generated, or a bad one
| is upon delivery ("FFrom ").
Generally, for every FFrom there is a rom, but the rom part may be lost.
While procmail is waiting for its standard second between "F" and "rom",
something holds it up, and it dies without finishing. Later another piece
arrives for the same folder, decides the lockfile is stale, steals the lock,
and writes away: then "F"+"From " = "FFrom ".
Of course the MUA doesn't consider "FFrom " the valid beginning of a message,
so mail reading is messed up as well.
You could try recompiling procmail with the one-second wait turned off
(there's a setting in config.h). Also, make sure you have all the lockfiles
you need; lack of a local lockfile can also cause this when two procmails
write to the same folder and step on each other's feet.
I used to have this problem on occasion, but I haven't in a long time. Per-
haps some mail is missing your personal procmail binary and is delivered by
the site's older version?
Sigh. One thing procmail could use is a VERSION or PROCMAIL_VERSION read-
only variable so that we can test on it and use appropriate recipes. Cap-
turing it this way:
VERSION=`procmail -v`
not only fills in a lot of extra text and forks an extra process, but it
reports on the earliest procmail binary in $PATH, which may or may not be
the same verson as the one currently reading the rcfile.