At 10:44 2008-12-11 +0000, Dave Wood did say:
Well I messed this up. I know now that [ ]  means excluding. But changing
the test to
No, [] encapsulates a character class.  [a-z] would mean match any single 
letter.  no hyphens would match individually specified symbols.
You might benefit from reading the procmail manpages.
* ^Subject:.*${BADWORDS}*
doesn't seem to work. Am I right in thinking that procmail is treating the
 | characters as part of the search string rather than an operator?
Well, you'd want to encapsulate the massive or'd list (else an or would 
evaluate to everything on one side of it - the first token in your list 
would evaluate with the ^Subject:.* part, but the rest would not), and lose 
the trailing asterisk (which would match on ZERO or more of the preceeding 
token).  Also, cram a $ before the regexp so that the variable is expanded 
before the evaluation:
* $ ^Subject:.*($BADWORDS)
Those are parenthesis, not braces.  The braces you're using will cause 
regexp operators in the BADWORDS variable to be escaped so that they could 
be evaluated as literals.  For example:
        donkey|ape|zebra
        would become:
        donkey\|ape\|zebra
Which would have the effect of making the Subject need to match the whole lot.
BTW, you need to be prepared for your badwords list to get screwed up - if 
you're editing it right at the time it gets used for an evaluation, what do 
you figure happens if BADWORDS is an empty list?
I use a different tact for wordlist matching:  the wordlist file has one 
word per line, and I basically invoke grep on the match line.  In 
actuality, I'm using a specialized program to accomplish this, but a grep 
equivalent would be something like:
:0
* ? formail -xSubject: | fgrep -i -f $BADWORDS
spam
---
 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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