At 03:51 2001-01-24 +0000, Philip Olson wrote:
I made a few new rules and want to run my new rules against a few
existing folders, such as INBOX, as to "become current." How can this be
done? ALL advice welcome. Am using standard unix pool format (pine).
1. Move your existing mailboxes to a new location. This is extremely
important.
2. execute:
formail -s procmail < oldboxes\mailbox
This splits the mailbox up into individual messages each of which is handed
to procmail, which lacking a '-m recipefile' argument (which one might
normally use when executing procmail via formail), will execute the .procmailrc
Procmail will do whatever it has been scripted to do with the message,
possibly emitting the message back into the original file where the message
would have been sourced from (like "inbox" or whatever you've named it),
which is part of the reason you want to MOVE the files first - otherwise
you end up with a loop. The other two predominant reasons are to avoid
duplicates (old, unfiltered messages at the beginning of the mailbox file,
and new, filtered ones simply tacked onto the end), as well as keeping
messages in some semblance of order.
If procmail is set up to be invoked for all new mail, note that new mail
arriving while you're running the formail process will be inserted into the
mailbox files at the point at which it arrived (whole messages only, so
you're not looking at a corruption problem - unless you're not locking your
mailboxes in the filters). The workaround would be to rename your
.procmailrc and execute procmail on the renamed version (new arrivals would
just go to your mail spool), then when done with your refiltering, run the
process on your system mailbox, followed by renaming your .procmailrc
back. That should do it more or less.
I did research how to do this, came up empty.
Uhm, try looking harder. The basic formail invocation above *IS* covered
in the Procmail mini-faq (linked from <http://www.procmail.org/> of all
places). Look at the first question under "Unrelated quick questions".
---
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Post Box 2395 / San Rafael, CA 94912-2395
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