procmail
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Re: Newbie question

2002-07-05 12:55:23
At 17:34 2002-07-05 +0100, Luis Oliveira wrote:
Hi,

Hi. Please consider turning off your fonts and other nifty features in your email to this list. It's unix. We like plaintext.

I'm just trying to put procmail at work, but I'm having some problems that I hope to fix with you guys. I think I followed the basic instructions, like creating the .forward file in the user home directory with the following contents:
[snip]

... and what exactly is or is not happening?  What is your procmai log showing?

Are you sysadm of the machine, or just some user? If sysadm, have you checked the system and mail log(s) to see if there are errors listed there, say about "suspicious rcfiles" or other security issues? Almost universally, when people have a problem even getting procmail to invoke on their messages, it's because their files have bad security settings.

See the "procdiag" script linked from my .sig.

"|IFS=' ' && p=/usr/bin/procmail && test -f $p&&exec $p -f-||exit 75 #username"

Q: are you sure that procmail isn't your LDA already? If it's the LDA (as defined by the MTA), then the .forward construct isn't even required.

On the .procmailrc file I have this:

PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/bin

You shouldn't need to redefine this unless you have a specfic situation that demands it. Procmail will set a reasonable path to start with.

MAILDIR=/var/spool/mail

No. MAILDIR should be the a directory belonging to *YOUR* user. Setting it this way won't suddendly cause failures, but when you opt to include an RCfile, or write messages to another dir, procmail will attempt to do it in THAT directory (unless you're providing a hardcoded path to elsewhere). In effect, procmail is changing directories to the specified directory when you define this variable. That isn't called for here - not THAT directory at least. More typically, it is set to something like:

        # dir must first EXIST though
        MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail

(or wherever your MUA puts read email)

DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/username

There should be absolutely no reason for you to redefine this. It gets redefined for advanced uses - leave it alone unless you have an express reason to change it. Refer to 'procmail -v' to see what procmail believes it should be delivering to.

LOGFILE=$HOME/.log
LOCKFILE=$HOME/.lockmail

Don't set lockfile unless you have a specific need to.

VERBOSE=yes

What does the verbose logfile say at this point?

:0
* ^From.*username2
!  username3

Syntactically correct, though you should note that this will Match within either "From " (the mailbox header - the _sender_), or "From:" (the mail header), or any other construct beginning with "From". You should therefore either expressly include a space or a colon. Also, not that it should have a bearing on your situation here, but where you might have dots '.' in the username2 address (used in the condition expression), you should escape them: '\.', because by itself, a dot is a wildcard (as in '.*' - which is zero or more of whatever), where within an address, you want them to be interpreted as dots: someuser(_at_)their\(_dot_)domain\(_dot_)tld

No doubt, your script isn't _EXACTLT_ as you provided it, and you exercised some license in changing things to protect the innocent -- in the process, you might actually change the reason something doesn't work.

Note that you really really really don't want to do a simple forward if that forward address might resolve to you (or they might forward to you).

This must be something very simple but I'm not just getting it done. The MTA is sendmail, procmail v3.13.1, and this on a SuSE 6.3 machine.

FTR, you really should upgrade procmail, at least to 3.15.2.

---
 Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

 Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
 Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.

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