procmail

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procmail
Design by Stephen R. van den Berg
Developed by Philip A. Guenther
Initial release December 7, 1990
Latest release 3.22 / September 10, 2001
Operating system Any Unix-like
Platform Cross-platform
Development status Mothballed
Type Mail filter
License GPL or Artistic License
Website http://www.procmail.org/
Free software portal

Procmail is a mail delivery agent (MDA) or mail filter, a program to process incoming emails on a computer, widely used on Unix systems. It is typically invoked from a mail transfer agent (MTA) like Sendmail or Postfix; this makes the mail processing event-driven. The companion-tool formail allows procmail to be used in batch-processing on mail that already is in a user's mailbox.

Common operations carried out with procmail include filtering and sorting of emails into different folders according to keywords in from, to, subject, text of the mail, or sending autoreplies, but more sophisticated operations are also possible.

A common practice is to let procmail call an external spam filter program, such as SpamAssassin. This method can allow for spam to be filtered or even deleted.


[edit] Examples

DROPPRIVS=yes
DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/
MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/

# Pass mail through spamc, the interface to SpamAssassin 
:0fw
| /usr/bin/spamc

# Move mail marked as spam to a mailbox named '.Trash/'
:0
* ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*
.Trash/

:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
.Trash/

# Move mail from these senders into Lists-Misc 
# Empty line is required (this uses a DeMorgan's law OR)
:0
* ! ^Sender: pgsql-hackers-owner@postgresql.org
* ! ^Sender: pgsql-sql-owner@postgresql.org
{ }

:0 E:
Lists-Misc

[edit] Further reading

  • Martin McCarthy, The Procmail Companion, Addison-Wesley, S. 256, November 2001, ISBN 0-201-73790-6

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procmail"
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