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Re: how to keep symlinked mailbox from getting nuked?

1997-11-01 12:09:29
Philip Guenther advised Charles Hines,

| David Tamkin pointed out that you can get
| around this by running procmail as follows:
| 
|       procmail -m $HOME/.procmailrc
| 
| then make sure you assign to ORGMAIL and DEFAULT at the top of your
| .procmailrc.

I did mention that to Philip, but I'll add one more thing: since using -m
also means that $MAILDIR defaults to . rather than to $HOME, you should
also assign MAILDIR (and use a full path) at the top of .procmailrc, since
otherwise it will be whatever directory the MTA was working in when it
invoked procmail.  If you have something like 

   MAILDIR = Mail

in your rcfile, based on the assumption that it will mean $HOME/Mail, it
will break badly.  (Procmail should still know the value of $HOME, so

   MAILDIR = $HOME/Mail

ought to work as expected.)

| Given that you control the procmail binary, I personally strongly recommend
| *against* doing this.  ...  (Or to summarize: if you think you know better
| than procmail, then do whatever you like.  Just don't blame it on procmail
| when things break.)

Philip's right: it does have its risks.  Procmail goes to some lengths to
provide a warm bed for most invocations, and when you give up any of that
protection you take responsibility for it yourself.

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