2000-04-15-10:52:48 J T Breitner:
Does procmail yet natively support the mbx mail-file format?
Nope.
If not, are there plans to do that?
I can't speak for the developers, I'm not one of them, but I very
very strongly doubt it. mbx format is not documented, so the only
way to add support for it to procmail would be either to try to
extract the needed code from the UW code, or link to that code, or
to attempt to reverse-engineer it. And since it's not a documented
format, the author can change it whenever he feels like.
Better to use a documented and supported interface for writing to
that folder format. Just end a recipe that needs to deliver with a
pipe to dmail, from the imap utilities package[1].
I understand that what's used in the past is to use dmail and then
call procmail out of the .forward file. However, I prefer to use
procmail as my mta. In fact, I'll gladly take the hit in imap
performance in exchange for the use of procmail.
Many confusions here.
If you're wanting to install system-wide standard delivery to mbx
format, that's tmail, a separate program from dmail.
Procmail is not an MTA (Mail Transport Agent) --- MTAs include
the traditional sendmail[2], as well as newer offerings like
Postfix[3] and qmail[4]. An MTA uses a Local Delivery Agent (LDA)
like /bin/mail or procmail, to handle local delivery. You can easily
take control over local delivery yourself, e.g. calling your own
LDA of choice from your .forward file or whatever is the equivalent
under your MTA.
-Bennett
[1] <URL:ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/imap-utils.tar.Z>
[2] <URL:http://www.sendmail.com/>
[3] <URL:http://www.postfix.org/>
[4] <URL:http://www.qmail.org/>
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