On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Landy Roman <landie(_at_)concentric(_dot_)net> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 12:54:45AM -0600, Philip Guenther wrote:
Trevor Jenkins <trevor(_dot_)jenkins(_at_)suneidesis(_dot_)com> writes:
...
Although there is an FAQ placed online from installing procmail it covers
systems progamming issues. It doesn't cover user aspects at all. Whilst
there are also online readmes, examples, and various man pages these still
don't answer what must be FAQs for people coming fresh to procmail.
I trawled the web looking for introductory material (i.e., post-FAQ level)
but these all assume a level of compentence with and of knowledge of
procmail not held by new users.
...
Have you checked out www.procmail.org?
To which I earlier replied "Yes!".
I found this to be the best tutorial out there
http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/qs
Been there too. My view too is it's "the best tutorial out there". But it
needs that qualification of "out there". The problem I encountered with
all the procmail "tutorial" sites is that the authors presume a minimal
level of knowledge about procmail.
Some of the best procmail sites have wonderful recipe books but they're
using features of procmail that are beyond a neophyte's understanding.
For each useful tip I glean from them my confusion (about procmail
features) grows exponentially.
What I (and suspect others) are looking for is a procmail tutorial that
starts "ab inito" and takes one through to understanding those wonderful
recipe collections. The on-lne FAQ doesn't address those initial
questions. Similarly the man pages assume that one has some knowledge of
how procmail works and is capable of.
Whilst following the discussions here and revisiting the
tutorial/collection sites I am creating some graded examples that I hope
will address those neophyte questions. My first one is munging "Reply-to:"
in message headers. (Yes, I know some people don't think that's sound. I
do.) Others will be removing useless parts (ie HTML alternatives and VCARD
attachments). Fixing up messages created by MTAs that don't generate
correct MIME headers. Then onto generalised attachment handling (keep the
real attachments, strip out HTML alternatives, and strip out attachments
only required by the HTML).
A separate set of examples will deal with "Subject:" headers. For example,
normalising "Re:" (I get messages in Swedish, German and French as well as
English) and adding tags for mailing lists. Indeed I learnt that
normalisation of "Re:" was possible from one of those recipe collections
but I still haven't figured how it is put together.
Only after these discrete exaples have been understood and mastered can
one contemplate putting them all together into one set of recipes.
If there is a procmail tutorial out there that takes one from "ab inito"
to advanced use then I haven't found it. But I'd be very pleased to hear
about it.
Regards, Trevor
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