Configuring procmail with The Dotfile Generator

With the reply action you can set up a reply mechanism, which sends a letter back to the sender with a message that you specify. One feature of this mechanism is that you can specify how often a reply should be sent. You have the following choices:

This action is useful if you leave on vacation, and wish to send a message that you will not read your letter at once.

The reply is sent only if the letter does not come from a daemon, to avoid sending a reply to every message on a mailing list.

With the forward action, you may forward letters to other e-mail accounts.

With this action, you can save the letter to a file. The file name is specified with a FillOut widget, just as you specified the name of a file for backups. This time, however, you have two additional features: you can use the content of a header field, or you can use the output from a command. In Figure 5, you can see how to select a header field to extract as part of the file name.

Figure 5. Header Field Selection

E-mail addresses can be specified in three ways:

If you specify that the field is an e-mail address, you may also specify whether you wish to extract the user name with or without the domain name.

Finally, you can pipe the header field though a specified command. This command can read the value of the header field on standard input and write to standard output.

With the pipe action, you can specify a command to take care of the letter. This command can read the letter on standard input but cannot write anything (it is ignored).

The procmail file generated from TDG contains lots of comments to make it easy for you to find a specific recipe.

Should something go wrong, you may turn on the extended diagnostic option. This will write additional lines to the log file to show you what it does. For debugging, you must read both the log file and the procmail file.

If you use the log abstract options, you will find the program mailstat very useful. It tells you how many letters have been delivered where. One line in the output from the mailstat programs is fake: /bin/false--it may be safely ignored. When you wish to delete a letter in a way that you can explicitly see that it has been removed, you should deliver it to the file called /dev/null. Please note that you can only use the mailstat program if the extended diagnostic option is turned off.

Before procmail starts filtering all your incoming mail, you must add the following line (i.e., no break) to the file called ~/.forward:

"|IFS=' ' &&exec /usr/local/bin/procmail -f-||exit 75

with the correct path name for procmail, and username replaced by your e-mail address.

Resources

Acknowledgments