Sigh.
It surely would be nice to use procmail the way it was intended.
I don't administer any systems, and procmail is not the LDA at any of my
shell accounts. It never has been, and I can't even hope for it to be.
(Yeah, yeah, run Linux on my local machine ... sure. Anyone tempted to say
that is welcome to take care of all my stresses and responsibilities for the
next couple years while I learn how to install and manage it.)
So the deal has always been to call procmail from .forward, and it would file
my incoming email. Of the three sites where I have shell accounts, that's
functional on only one (and I'll be losing access to it around November 1).
Then there are the other two.
On the second one I've never, never managed to get procmail on the machine
that delivers mail (which users cannot log into) to agree on locking proto-
cols with the MUAs on the shell servers. Even dotlocking doesn't work be-
tween the platforms. So .forward calls procmail, which files my incoming
mail into holding folders in another directory. I wrote a script, invoked by
my fingers from a shell prompt and also called from my .profile, that removes
filed mail from the holding directory's folders and appends it to their name-
sakes in my real mail directory. And you, even so, I still get some inter-
leaving and masses of nulls.
On the third, things worked dandily until recently. There were four shell
servers; if I compiled procmail on #1 or #2, it would run only on those two.
If I compiled procmail on #3 or #4, it would run on all four and on the mail
delivery machine (which, like that of ISP #2, does not allow user shell
logins). So I used to be careful to compile all versions of procmail on #3
or #4. But a few weeks ago TPTB decided to consolidate user shell logins
onto a single machine, and it runs the OS of old machine #1. So I compiled
procmail 3.15 there, but it won't run on the mail delivery box. If I call
procmail from .forward, all incoming mail is bounced. If I people write to
me specifically on the shell server machine, mail still goes to the mail de-
livery machine. So I let mail accumulate in my default system inbox, and a
cron job calls procmail to file messages in their proper places periodically.
Letting procmail file messages as they come in? Soon to be a memory for me.
Having it as the LDA? Not even a memory for me.
It surely would be nice to use procmail the way it was intended.
_______________________________________________
procmail mailing list
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail