procmail
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Re: Possible formail problem?

1998-08-08 21:21:58


| I've discovered that biff will not work when formail (or any other
| program such as cat) is used to send the mail to a file.  


It's not a formail problem: maybe it's a procmail problem in that it doesn't
stop to consider that $LASTFOLDER isn't very meaningful to comsat when
$LASTFOLDER is a pipe.  Maybe it's a biff problem in that it can't deal with
being told that the thrower or the LDA delivered to a command instead of a
file.

I imagine that it would be very difficult to get biff to follow up on a
piped-to command to see what it ended up doing with it.  Wouldn't it be
more practical to have keep procmail silent when the action line is a
pipe, and instead have formail do the notifying?  
And to put a number on the extent of my experience, what is a thrower and
LDA?


| Is there any way to get around this while still using formail to 
| process the mail?

Well, yes.

 :0fwh
 * ^(Apparently-)?(To:|Cc:).*mjm
 | $FORMAIL -A"X-Sorted: Default Mail"
 :0A:
 $DEFAULT

Could you elaborate a bit on the f flag?  The man page says
f       Consider the pipe a filter

but what exactly does that mean?

And to nitpick a bit, what does the h flag accomplish?  The man page says
that it is a default flag- does its use prevent the pipe from filtering
the body (and thus minimizing processing time)?


Finally, you might want to consider changing the condition on that
recipe to use procmail's ^TO_ token (or the ^TO token if your version of
procmail doesn't support ^TO_):


Actually, my goal was to differentiate between mail sent explicitly to me
and that which is bcc'ed (spam lists), Resent-To: (occasionally weeds out
stupid forwarded jokes), etc.  I probably should expand it's match
capabilities a bit, but....

Thanks,

Mark Miller
mjm(_at_)bnet(_dot_)org

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