I've set up a spam-killing procmail filter for myself and several other
users here that is smart enough to try to deliver mail locally for users
that want that, forward it on to another address if that is desired, or
both. It works fine delivering to a local mbox, and both, but not just
fowarding. I have it set up so that technically what it is trying to do
is forward and save locally at all times, but for local-only users there
is a duplicate detection loop, their main address is used as the
forward-to address also, and the 2nd copy is delete. For offsite-only
users, their alternative address is used to forward to, and $DEFAULT is
set to /dev/null. This SHOULD work, but in fact it does not. Mail is
delivered to the default procmail $DEFAULT (/var/mail/$USER on this
system), no matter how I try to redefine that to be /dev/null. I have
tried DEFAULT=/dev/null on the procmail commandline in .forward, adding it
to the top of the .procmailrc, and even making a .procmailrc that consists
of nothing but this line and an INCLUDERC that points to the spam
filtering rules in another file. Procmail still insists on delivering this
mail to /var/mail/$USER, in direct defiance of these env.var.
reassignments.
Any idea how to fix this? It's driving me nuts.
As an aside, I'm not even sure if procmail is forwarding the messages to
the offsite address as well as saving locally. I know that with a user who
gets mail BOTH offsite and onsite on purpose, the mail is forwarding, but
the offsite-only user in this case has not responded to test messages, so
I am suspecting procmail is choking to death on the DEFAULT=/dev/null and
not doing anything at all. It creates no logfile for this user, though it
does for myself and the off-and-on-site users. It only fails to do so for
the offsite-only user.
I'll be happy to schare the .procmail and .forward files if that is
necessary.
--
Stanton McCandlish
mech(_at_)eff(_dot_)org
Electronic Frontier Foundation Program Director
http://www.eff.org/~mech +1 415 436 9333 x105 (v), +1 415 436 9333 (f)
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