Archive-name-to-be: mail/procmail-faq-pointer
URL: http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/
Last-modified: Thu Mar 18 23:12:12 EET 1999
Posting-frequency: Every 11 days
Subscription and unsubscription instructions for the Procmail mailing
list are included below.
The Procmail Mini-FAQ and its companion Procmail Links page are
available at the following locations:
Procmail Mini-FAQ: <http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/mini-faq.html>
Procmail Links: <http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/links.html>
Please view the Table of Contents for the FAQ near the end of this
posting. If you have a question about Procmail, you should hopefully
find it there.
The following mirror sites are available:
United States
<http://mirror.ncsa.uiuc.edu/procmail-faq/>
<http://www.zer0.org/procmail/>
<http://moongroup.com/unix/procmail/>
United Kingdom
<http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~procmail/faq/>
Please use one of the mirrors if you can.
If you would like to receive the FAQ by electronic mail, send a
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the Subject: header to the address
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The Links page is not very useful if you do not have WWW access. You
can receive the HTML version by e-mail, though; use the Subject line
"send links.html" instead. The HTML version of the FAQ can be
retreived with the Subject: send mini-faq.html
If you can't receive large messages, you can receive the text version
of the mini-FAQ in parts by requesting "mini-faq/parts" instead of
"mini-faq.txt".
My current plan is to send this out every 11 days and see how people
react. If nobody reacts in any way, I will probably continue to send
it out this way, and/or ultimately seek news.answers approval for this
notice.
/* era */
Changes to the FAQ since the previous announcement
==================================================
The following change log details recent developments since this
announcement was last posted. The WWW version has a full change log
which goes further back.
Mini-Faq:
date: 1999/03/18
formail: formail: cannot open
date: 1999/03/11
Bart Schaefer's notes on (not) porting to NT
Links:
date: 1999/03/15
RFC pointers now point to www.rfc-editor.org and ftp.isi.edu
date: 1999/03/11
POP is RFC1225
RFC2060 is the newest IMAP spec
date: 1999/03/10
Weeded out some remaining references to 3.11pre7
date: 1999/03/03
Procmail version 3.12 is out
date: 1999/03/02
Nexor RFC mirror is gone; linking to Pasteur instead
date: 1999/02/27
Maildrop site moved (thanks to Mr. Sam for notifying)
date: 1999/02/26
Restructured links to Jari's stuff
date: 1999/02/25
Created a proper table of contents; rehashed structure a bit (moved
all the spam stuff to one place; probably still contains a lot of
broken links though); pointers to procmail.org; added some RFCs to the
RFC section (should add more); Annoying Autoresponders FAQ link; added
vacation and mailfilter to "competing efforts"
date: 1999/02/07
Dougal Campbell's stuff has moved; redirected the link
date: 1999/01/20
Moved the RBL stuff to http://www.iki.fi/era/rbl/rbl.html
date: 1999/01/13
Fetchmail FAQ's location updated
date: 1998/12/29
Open Directory Project http://directory.mozilla.org has a good
collection of Procmail links. Also added a Yahoo search, "to create
some balance" :-)
Bob's Spam Filter (in the tutorial secition, too)
date: 1998/12/28
Redirected John Hardin's links again ...
date: 1998/12/12
At John Hardin's request, redirect his links to point to lowrent.org
date: 1998/12/10
Link to some of the mirrors on Xoom where the primary is gone or
unreliable or cumbersome; Filtering Mail FAQ links were mostly bad,
took out a lot of them and noted that this is apparently no longer
actively maintained; Joe Gross's tutorial appears to be gone but is in
the Mirror Cupboard; link to today's posting on fgrepping from an
external file of spammers (should be in the FAQ too I guess); link to
John Hardin's Enhancing E-Mail Security with Procmail page; Bill
Wohler's link collection (whew!)
date: 1998/12/05
Chris Lindsey's wishlist (got the link a long time ago, just been
lazy, I'm afraid ... Rather inexplicably put it in the "rich and
famous" section)
date: 1998/11/19
URL for Bob Rankin's Access by Email FAQ changed on FAQS.org
date: 1998/11/15
Orca DUL dial-up RBL-type list, and Chris Lewis's Unix email survey
FAQ
date: 1998/11/10
Philip Guenther's snapshot and todo list, and a link to the
procmail-dev mailing list
date: 1998/11/03
adcomplain
LAN mail protocols FAQ
date: 1998/10/27
Joe Gross's tutorial moved (to "www.procmail.net" [sic!])
Experimental: Mirror Cupboard
Hunted up a new working URL for Terry Jones's Spamometer
date: 1998/10/13
Lasu's pages are gone, took out the dead links (thanks to my anonymous
fan at <code>ling.helsinki.fi</code> for notifying me)
date: 1998/09/30
Link to Leah Robertson's Procmail spam links collection (posted to
spamtools list by Mr. Sam)
date: 1998/09/25
shub-inter.net RBL-type list for rblcheck etc
date: 1998/09/08
Corrected URL for Greg Sutter's Junkfilter
Pointers to mbox documentation (thanks to Chris Lindsey; grabbed from
the list)
date: 1998/08/20
Include Dorkslayers link with rblcheck link (and note that rblcheck is
now at v1.4)
date: 1998/08/14
Telerama scoring filter
date: 1998/08/13
Link to Jason S Kohles's SmartList FAQ
date: 1998/08/05
Virtual Landlord link broken (thanks to Amy for the report)
date: 1998/07/21
jhardin's "anti-spam-and-other-garbage rules" kit
date: 1998/07/16
More pager threads from Rosat
date: 1998/07/15
Elm filter resources
Split tangential links into tentative sections; link to maildrop
date: 1998/07/04
Project Cyrus at CMU
date: 1998/06/24
The entire change log for the links page was apparently posted with
the previous announcement; my sincere apologies
Walter Dnes's Spamdunk page
date: 1998/06/04
New mirror at http://mirror.ncsa.uiuc.edu/procmail-faq/
date: 1998/05/22
Took out the rather bad Yahoo links and replaced them with some
collected on-line Unix references (not necessarily too good either).
Updated the quick reference with most of Holger's suggestions, as well
as some additions of my own.
date: 1998/05/11
Dan Bernstein's IMMHF page (excellent!)
Link to Quick Reference
date: 1998/04/29
Links to more or less relevant newsgroups
Link to an RFC search engine and the IETF's RFC pages
date: 1998/04/24
Removed a lot of deadwood from the spam links section (old block lists
which are no longer available or badly out of date)
date: 1998/04/11
Dan Smith's URL no longer operational; tamu mirror changed; shuffled
the order of items in the "central information" section
date: 1998/04/08
Halcyon's Procmail Guide
date: 1998/03/19
link to vortex.com's block list
date: 1998/03/11
Samuel Mikes's VM FAQ
date: 1998/03/09
Link to Doug Oard's Information Filtering Resources page
date: 1998/02/03
Link to HWG's Filtering FAQ
date: 1998/01/16
David Tamkin's sed script for getting a second copy of the headers
date: 1998/01/15
Annotated Rich & Famous section a little bit -- should hopefully
attract more visitors
Jari's library in the Procmail Applications section
date: 1997/12/10
Updated pointer to Sendmail FAQ (now on sendmail.org)
date: 1997/12/08
Cameron Laird is rich and famous
date: 1997/12/05
Edward S. Marshall's rblcheck
date: 1997/12/02
Claus A\xDFman
date: 1997/10/21
tinypm.el
date: 1997/10/18
Rearranged the Procmail-L archive links some more
Added www.redhat.com to hosts filtered in the canned Alta Vista search
More on NoCeM-E, including Dougal Campbell's mailing list
date: 1997/10/17
Alta Vista query URL:s changed to request text-only page (easier to
get graphics if you want them than the other way around)
Local copies of man pages; links.html#manpages
Moved Jari's "best of" into the mailing list section
date: 1997/10/15
Jari renamed his page
date: 1997/10/14
Dan Smith's recipes (ftp)
Include listhelp.txt with help file from mailing list (unsubscribe
instructions!)
date: 1997/10/09
Spamtrap
date: 1997/09/20
Jari Aalto is Rich and Famous (at least to Emacs users ... Well, make
that "infamous" :-)
Petri Kaukasoina and macabrus(_at_)aol(_dot_)com in net.abuse links
date: 1997/09/04
Telebyte link
date: 1997/08/28
Bobby check (see <http://www.cast.org/bobby/>)
date: 1997/08/24
New URL for ProcLog; apparently no longer very much in beta
date: 1997/08/19
spamometer, announced by Terry Jones on Procmail-L
date: 1997/08/18
Achim Bohnet is back on line and archiving -- took out note about
pause since April
date: 1997/08/05
Mike Rose is rich and famous (thanks to Simeon Nevel for the pointer)
date: 1997/07/30
Link to David Tamkin's pager forwarding recipe on Rosat
a name=tags for utilities for easy reference; included pointer to good
old mdate in the Rosat archive
More links to list archives; Adam Shostack's PGP scriptlet
date: 1997/07/29
Broke the spam-fighting tools and spam filters in the Applications
section into their own subsection. Added junkfilter to this section
and rearranged it somewhat. Added pointer to Eli's proc-util package
under utilities and JD Falk's Cybernothing filters under
net-abuse/tangential.
date: 1997/07/11
Link to examples/advanced
Ariel's tutorial (grr, she said she'd notify me when it's ready)
date: 1997/07/10
Link to Eli's Perl-embedded version
date: 1997/06/27
Another canned Alta Vista search; Phil Edwards' tutorial and Virtual
Landlord in the howto section; Roman Czyborra's Rich and Famous page
(in German, but still useful)
Implemented version history for this file, too
date: 1997/06/26
More MIME FAQ pointers and a cleanup wrt faqs.org and ruu.nl --
include landfield and ruu mirrors for FAQs where available (sendmail
and Eli's addressing FAQ)
date: 1997/06/25
comp.mail{,.mime} FAQ and Emil pointers
date: 1997/06/15
Broke the tutorials section into newbie and howto subsections; HTML
version of Tony Nugent's tutorial
Lots of small changes, as well as a few new items:
* Axel Zinser's han.de archive
* Concordia's net.abuse links
* spamkiller at http://www.cs.cuc.edu/~sopwith/nospam/
* Useful things you can do with e-mail; Dr Bob (urgh) and email4u
(urgh^2) Moved around a few things (Filtering Mail FAQ is back in
tutorials; Net Access went to the net.abuse section)
date: 1997/06/12
Fetchmail FAQ
Ian Sobroff's tutorial (from the a2i web page)
Barry Twycross is rich and famous
date: 1997/06/07
Jim D's tutorial is now somewhat HTML:ized
date: 1997/05/30
Broke net-abuse related material into its own section
date: 1997/05/29
Concordia "tutorial" link
EtB in the Rich and Famous section
date: 1997/05/26
Hopefully better Yahoo link for shell scripting intro
NoCem (added earlier, but never checked in or remade); Eli's FAQ is no
longer "Pre"
date: 1997/05/13
Linux Gazette article
date: 1997/05/11
Complete list of mirrors; include README, INSTALL and HISTORY from the
distribution
Neil's recipes
Some more net-abuse links (thanks to Max Devlin and Zoli Fekete)
date: 1997/05/04
Minor tweaks; Yahoo URLs were wrong (underscores)
imc.org link out of the Sendmail FAQ
date: 1997/05/03
Found Ariel's Spam Bouncer by looking for Procmail in Yahoo
utilities section -- dotfile generator as well as proclint and a new
log analyzer by Aaron Turner (beta announced on mailing list)
date: 1997/04/28
SmartList in applications; link to Felix von Leitner; rearranged and
commented tutorial section quite a bit
Lasu's Procmail page, and a couple of spam links
date: 1997/04/25
Couple more tutorials
Rigged a search for on-line manual pages; other minor tweaks
date: 1997/04/24
Initial revision
Quickref:
date: 1999/03/01
Messed up and/or clarified the explanation of the f flag a little bit
more
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Abridged Table of Contents for the FAQ
======================================
This is a short (abridged) listing of the contents of the FAQ.
Hopefully, you should find your question here, and its answer in the
FAQ.
* What is Procmail? -- Description, availability, and installation
+ Is there a Procmail for Windows NT?
+ How can I run an arbitrary Perl or shell script on all or
selected incoming mail?
+ How to get answers to questions which this FAQ doesn't cover
+ Why am I getting spam from the Procmail list server?
+ I subscribed to the Procmail-L mailing list earlier but
haven't seen any messages for a while. Did the listserv
crash?
* How do I use wildcards in Procmail? Explain file locking, please.
... and other syntax issues, including:
+ How can I forward to many addresses?
+ Generally speaking, how do I do more than one action on a
recipe?
+ I know how to forward a message, but how do I forward a
modified message?
+ How can I change the contents of a message but otherwise
proceed through my .procmailrc as usual?
+ I want to pass some information to a script I run from within
Procmail
+ What's a "folder"?
+ What does the second colon in :0: mean?
+ What does "Couldn't determine implicit lockfile" mean?
+ What's this From_ header?
+ How can I do a logical OR of two conditions?
+ Can I list several actions under a common condition? How?
+ How can I test the value of a variable or argument?
+ Efficiency tips
+ Short example recipes sprinkled throughout the text
* Help, I get this error message ... -- Troubleshooting tips
Some highlights:
+ An example debugging .rc file
+ Known bugs, common gotchas, and funny quirks
... including, but not limited to:
o Memory handling with huge messages / on FreeBSD
o The regexp engine is not egrep compatible
o There is no ^FROM macro
o Backslash parsing is sometimes counter-intuitive
o Always include a SHELL= definition
+ Getting the thing to run in the first place
+ What goes in your .forward file
+ Yikes! Where did my mail go??
+ Why is Procmail writing to a file called *?
+ What are these fields that get written to the log?
+ Why does formail fail when looking for duplicates?
+ What's this about "rescued data" from a filtering recipe?
+ Why won't biff work right for my own folders?
* How do I ...? -- Running Procmail
+ ... match on the BCC header?
+ ... implement a virtual domain? Or, how can I let several
local users share the same POP mailbox at the upstream? Or,
what is the most frequently made wrong assumption about mail
delivery?
+ ... figure out who to Cc: when there are several recipients?
+ ... run Procmail on a file of messages?
+ ... trim down the From: field to just user(_at_)host?
+ ... know what EXITCODE to use?
+ ... prevent my .forward from showing in bounces?
+ ... extract (or kill) MIME parts from messages?
+ ... write a "vacation" program? An autoresponder?
* Where can I learn more? -- A small links collection
* Appendices
+ Appendix A -- Folder Formats
+ Appendix B -- Figuring Out the Mail Flow
+ Appendix C -- Procmail Mirrors