procmail
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procmail documentation problem

1998-08-12 22:49:24
| (On the side, with procmail 3.10 at least the docs say falling off the
| end of .procmailrc delivers to $DEFAULT which defaults to the system
| mailbox. This is not true. procmail ALWAYS delivers to /var/mail/user
| when falling off .procmailrc, REGARDLESS of the setting of $DEFAULT. I
| did not test the behaviour of 3.11pre7.)

Now that is odd.  DEFAULT worked properly in 3.10.  Are you sure that

sorry but I have to disagree

$DEFAULT is something where procmail can write safely?  Are you positive
it is getting assigned?  If it is not assigned it defaults to $ORGMAIL,
and if procmail gets to the end of the rcfile and cannot write to $DEFAULT,
it saves to $ORGMAIL.

Yes, I am positive that procmail does not work as procmailrc.1 says.

procmail -v
procmail v3.11pre7 1997/04/28 written and created by Stephen R. van den Berg
Locking strategies:     dotlocking, fcntl(), lockf()
Default rcfile:         $HOME/.procmailrc
Your system mailbox:    /var/mail/kuhlmav

uname -a
SunOS andromeda 5.5 Generic sun4d sparc SUNW,SPARCserver-1000

$HOME/.procmailrc (abridged):
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/inbox                  #completely optional
[...]
:0:
$DEFAULT

Delivers to $MAILDIR/inbox. Commenting out the last recipe, causing a
fall off the end delivers to the system mailbox.

This is what man procmailrc says:

     DEFAULT     Default mailbox file  (if  not  told  otherwise,
                 procmail will dump mail in this mailbox).  Proc-
                 mail will automatically use $DEFAULT$LOCKEXT  as
                 lockfile  prior to writing to this mailbox.  You
                 do not need  to  set  this  variable,  since  it
                 already points to the standard system mailbox.
     ORGMAIL     Usually the system mailbox  (ORiGinal  MAILbox).
                 If,  for  some  obscure reason (like `filesystem
                 full') the mail could  not  be  delivered,  then
                 this  mailbox will be the last resort.

I have never changed ORGMAIL. The file $DEFAULT is writable or delivery
to it would file with an explicit last recipe.

This behaviour is the same in procmail 3.10.

Setting both ORGMAIL and DEFAULT to a file other than the system mailbox
still delivers to the system mailbox.

I do not think this is a problem, but it would be nice if the man pages
could be corrected.

Volker