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Re: howto run procmail on INBOX?

1998-12-08 06:28:09



Thanks Mark and Era for your inputs. I tried Mark's suggestion and bizzare
things began happening. First, the number of processes which I owned just
shot up and exceeded the maximum number of processes allowed per user.
However, I managed to kill every one of the procmail processes. After
that, whenever I used to run procmail (i.e. whenever any new mail would
come in), my mailbox would be locked and I wouldn't be able to access it.
So I switched off procmail and found to my dismay that I wasn't able to
receive any incoming mail at all albeit I was able to send out mail. As a
last resort I moved my mailbox file to a different location and moved it
back to its original location and I began recieving incoming mail again. I
switched procmail on again and things are back to normal....so far!

I have no explanation what happened, why it happened and how my "trick"
worked.

-dnp


On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, era eriksson wrote:

On Mon, 7 Dec 1998 10:27:12 -0600 (CST), Mark Shaw
<mshaw(_at_)asic(_dot_)sc(_dot_)ti(_dot_)com> wrote:
 >> Can anyone tell me how I can run procmail on my existing INBOX? I would
 >> like to sort my INBOX (/home/dnp) with some new rules. 
 > Here's what I do:
 > formail -ns procmail newrules.rc < /usr/spool/mail/mshaw

This is risky for various reasons. You should lock your spool file
before starting procmail on it, or actually preferrably move it to a
different file and empty the spool file, and then run procmail on the
copy. 
  The procmail(1) manual page has a script which does this (search for
"cron"; not the "SEE ALSO" occurrence though, of course).

/* era */

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