On Sun, Apr 22, 2001 at 01:38:23AM -0400, Don Hammond wrote:
On 21 Apr, Paul M Foster wrote:
<snip>
| 1. Apparently, when piping through, say, formail, you don't need to use
| a lockfile. Why? (Of course, I don't know why you'd use a lockfile in
| the first place.)
A pipe to to formail isn't writing to any regular files on disk.
Not sure I agree. If I don't do something like:
| formail ... >> $DEFAULT
the output from formail seems to disappear. So in this case, I'm writing
back to the spoolfile, which is a regular file on disk.
| 2. Under certain circumstances, you would use the "f" flag in the
| beginning of a recipe to indicate that you want procmail to filter the
| header or whatever. But if I use a piping recipe (e.g. | formail ...),
| why would I need to _tell_ procmail I'm filtering the email, since the
| pipe automatically indicates some sort of filter? Perhaps more
| important, how does procmail handle things internally differently if you
| tell it to filter, versus when you don't?
Because your assumption that a pipe automatically indicates a filter is
incorrect.
:0:
* spam condition(s)
| gzip -c >>$SPAM.gz
This is a delivery not a filter. ;-)
Alrighty, then I don't know what a filter is. I would have assumed that
anything is a filter when email is piped to it. It seems by your answer
that a "filter" would be something which is "non-delivery". According
to the man page, that's only things which 1) give the email back to
procmail for handling, 2) start a nesting block, or 3) recipes that use
the "c" flag. Is this correct? If so, some of the FAQ stuff I've seen
seems incorrect. Often when formail is used, the "f" flag is also used.
And if you don't want to make formail output disappear, you have to dump
it back on the spool or give it back to procmail (which would, of
course, make it non-delivery).
Paul
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