MUA Filters vs Procmail filters[was] RE: Mailing list procmailrecipe

[Alexander Dalloz]

Am Sa, den 10.04.2004 schrieb Jay Daniels um 17:34:

> > Remember that if sendmail is setup to include procmail  magic in
> > .procmailrc and tinkering with  .forward  is not needed.
> > 
> > On FC1 it is common to see procmail as a local resource for sendmail:
> >   $ grep procmail /etc/mail/*mc
> >   /etc/mail/sendmail.mc:define(`PROCMAIL_MAILER_PATH',`/usr/bin/procmail')dnl
> >   /etc/mail/sendmail.mc:FEATURE(local_procmail,`',`procmail -t -Y -a $h -d $u')dnl/etc/mail/sendmail.mc:MAILER(procmail)dnl
> 
> If I understand correctly, then I can delete ~/.forward?
> 
> In the grep I get the same as you on the *mc files.
> 
> This is great, I can then setup a system wide .procmailrc and create
> .procmail/rc.* for all users?

> jay

Jay,

of course. I mailed that circumstance in a more descriptive way too on
Thursday:

"The procmail call in the .forward file is only necessary if the MTA
does
not call procmail directly as the LDA. I.e. on a mail system running
sendmail it is totally unnecessary to call procmail a second time
because by standard sendmail uses procmail as the LDA/MDA (local
delivery agent / mail delivery agent). Although sendmail can use
different LDAs like maildrop or let cyrus imapd do the job."

In other words: Sendmail only acts as MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) and gets
the mail by foreign senders and passes the incoming mail to the LDA/MDA
configured in sendmail.mc. Sendmail does not care for mail storage,
that's the LDA job.

So kick away the user's .forward file for passing the mails through
procmail. Use a global /etc/procmailrc for global filtering (if you wish
that) and use user specific ~/.procmailrc files for user specific
filtering / sorting. That's default and you do not need to change
anything to get it working.

Alexander


-- 
Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG key 1024D/ED695653 1999-07-13
Fedora GNU/Linux Core 1 (Yarrow) on Athlon CPU kernel 2.4.22-1.2174.nptl
Sirendipity 17:59:37 up 22 days, 1:41, load average: 1.07, 1.08, 1.08 
                   [ Γνωθι σ'αυτον - gnothi seauton ]
             my life is a planetarium - and you are the stars
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