procmail
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Procmail FAQ and Links pointer (pre-faq or pre-inf)

1999-12-16 23:18:17
Archive-name-to-be: mail/procmail-faq-pointer
URL:                http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/
Last-modified:      Sun Nov 28 19:27:31 EET 1999
Posting-frequency:  Every 11 days


Subscription and unsubscription instructions for the Procmail mailing
list are included below.

  Newsflash / Nov 23 1999: Procmail 3.14 is out.

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:

   North America
          <http://mirror.ncsa.uiuc.edu/procmail-faq/>
          <http://www.zer0.org/procmail/>
          <http://moongroup.com/unix/procmail/>

   Europe
          <http://www.xs4all.nl/~sister/mirror/procmail/>

   Please use one of the mirrors if you can.

Other useful on-line resources related to Procmail include

  <http://www.procmail.org/>
        -- Procmail and SmartList Home Page
  <http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/>
        -- Searchable archive of the Procmail Mailing List  
  <http://www.professional.org/procmail/unsubscribe.html>
        -- Sean's Unsubscribe FAQ for the Alphabet Challenged
  <http://www.hartzler.net/smartlist/SmartList-FAQ.html>
        -- SmartList FAQ, now maintained by Peter Hartzler

The Links page, of course, has links to lots more.

If you would like to receive the FAQ by electronic mail, send a
message with the words "send mini-faq.txt" (sans quotation marks) in
the Subject: header to the address
    <era+pr(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi>

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: 1999/11/25
  
     Recommend sticking to 3.13.1 for now; 3.14.1 should be out shortly

     
Links:
  
  
  

     
Quickref:
  
  date: 1999/11/28
  
     Yikes -- character class trick example in regex section was wrong.
     Thanks to Rejo Zenger and Philip Guenther for the discussion on the
     list.


How to subscribe/unsubscribe
============================

If you would like to subscribe to the Procmail mailing list, send a
message containing the word "subscribe" (without the quotes (and
without this parenthetical remark, too :^)) in the Subject: field to
<procmail-request(_at_)informatik(_dot_)rwth-aachen(_dot_)de>. Please spend an
additional second to check the spelling of that single word before you
send off the message.
  To unsubscribe from the list, change "subscribe" to "unsubscribe".
This word seems even harder to spell right than the other one.
  Note that these messages should not be sent to the list address
<procmail(_at_)informatik> which is what you might have in your address
book or similar -- mail to that address will be distributed to all the
list subscribers (and make some of them very upset, if it's not about
Procmail.)

The FAQ contains some friendly comments on netiquette. Please read
them before posting to the list.

The list robot is not very tolerant of mail errors and will
automatically unsubscribe you if it gets many bounces from your
address. Just subscribe yourself again if this happens. (You should
expect to see several message from the list per day.)

I have no influence over how the list is operated. 

If you thought these instructions were too complicated, the
Unsubscribe FAQ is definitely not for you. (See URL above.)


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
          + Where do I start?
          + 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 a message but leave a copy on the server?
            (Also how do I not leave a copy on the server.)
          + How about saving to multiple folders?
          + How can I forward to many addresses?
          + Generally speaking, how do I do more than one action on a
            message?
          + I get these procmail: Skipped "(something)" errors ...
          + 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's a spool file?
          + What does the second colon in :0: mean?
          + What does "Couldn't determine implicit lockfile" mean?
          + Where are files created / stored?
          + 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
          + I'm having a hard time with \/
          + Why shouldn't I use the * wildcard?
          + 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 Upgrade to 3.12/3.13 breaks Procmail on systems with
                 group-writable directories (e.g. Red Hat Linux)
               o The regex 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 *?
          + Why is Procmail writing to the console? Can I stop that?
          + 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 get Procmail and Netscape to cooperate?
     * 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?
          + ... do different actions depending on the time of day?
          + ... 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

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