procmail
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Re: 3.11pre7 "Breaking" 3.10 Recipes

1998-07-15 08:43:28
    Thanks to era eriksson for his response.

On Wed, 15 Jul 1998, era eriksson wrote:

On Tue, 14 Jul 1998 21:36:43 -0400 (EDT), Paul O Bartlett
<pobart(_at_)access(_dot_)digex(_dot_)net> wrote:
 >     Then my ISP upgraded the procmail on the mail servers to 3.11pre7,
 > and those recipes "broke."  Apparently they somehow brought the mail
 > servers to their knees, although I do not have specifics.  The help

Do you know what hardware the servers are running? How Procmail was
compiled? Can you get this information?

    I do not have this information.  I think the ISP runs various
hardware, but whether they would tell me I do not know.

If you're scared of running Procmail at all, you can at least try to
invoke stuff directly from your .forward to give you some diagnostics.

    In fact I am running procmail.  All my recipes which merely stash
mail (such as from this list) into various folders still work just
fine.  It is just two that I had which I have not been able to run: 
the spam-killer (now I have to deliver _all_ spam to a trash folder
instead of killing some of it outright) and the vacation autoresponder.
By the way, if it makes any difference, the mail servers are on one or
more machines, and when I dial in for my shell account, I get one of
four machines other than the mail servers.  Apparently there is some
kind of distributed file system, but I am not a unix guru to understand
what is going on.  I just want to process my incoming mail in an
effective manner as I used to under v3.10.

[...]

 > systems staff provide few or no details, even to the help desk.  Has
 > anyone heard of such a things as installation "switches" in 3.11pre7 
 > which could cause 3.10-correct procmail recipes to cause sendmail 
 > sessions go wild?  (On another of my ISPs subdomains everything seems 
 > to be OK, but I don't know what version of procmail it is running.)

You could use a bare-bones .forward (or .procmailrc) to forward all
mail to this particular host if you're not already running there.

    The help desk manager, who apparently has a little leeway, has
offered to set me up with an account on the subdomain on which procmail
is apparently running correctly and let me forward all incoming mail to
that account via .forward and let procmail do its thing there. 
However, that seems to me to be cumbersome, as I don't know how I would
be able to get mail back to my "home" account.  I suppose I would have
to telnet or rlogin to the second account.  On the home account I would
do something like news and so on.  Splitting activity between two
accounts would be a tremendous bother, it seems to me.  (By choice I
use Pine for both mail and news and sometimes store messages from either
in the same folders.)

-- 
Paul                             <pobart(_at_)access(_dot_)digex(_dot_)net>
..........................................................
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
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Home Page:  http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart