[olug] whats procmail?

[ktb]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2002 at 06:13:02AM -0600, Brian Wiese wrote:
> Ok, I've kinda heard about this thing called 'procmail' for some time now,
> and I'm sure you've all heard of it too, right? ;)  Well, I'm still
> wondering how it works and what it does.
> 
> It seems to be a filter for email message, so you can set up rules to do
> certain things and all when an email comes in.  But could someone please
> give me the 1,2,3 of how this works?  Do you configure procmail to 'get'
> your email from your pop3 accounts (so you have to tell it your pop3
> account name, pop3 address, and password..) or does one's email client do
> that... and somehow procmail gets run when another program 'gets' your
> emails.  I've been lookn around the man pages and all and dont see
> anything about pop3 account settings for procmail.
> 
> Problem is this... and I'm wondering if procmail is my answer.
> My friend has several pop3 email accounts he doesnt use much anymore, and
> wants to stop using them.  But he wants a setup so that whenever the other
> accounts receive a message, an automatic reply is sent out saying ".. stop
> sending mail here, send it to me at example.com".  

Here are a couple links for you -
http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/proctips.html

For your friend's problem:
http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/proctips.html#newaddr

Basically you bring your mail in with something like fetchmail then
procmail sorts your mail into your mail boxes.

Create a Procmail directory in your home directory.  Add a lists.rc file
to that directory with various sorting rules such as: 

:0:
* (^TO|^CC*)misc
o_bsd

The above takes all mail CC'ed and TO "misc" and sends it to my o_bsd
mail folder.

You also need to create a .procmailrc file in your home directory
populated with the likes of:

VERBOSE=no # Set to yes when debugging
MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail       # Make sure this directory exists!
PMDIR=$HOME/Procmail
LOGFILE=$PMDIR/log
INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/lists.rc

There is a little more to it than that but that should give you a start.
hth,
kent

-- 
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the
   same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
                                     --Albert Einstein


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