procmail & .forward

[Mark J. Reed]

On 2004-02-18 at 16:23:48, Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am Mi, den 18.02.2004 schrieb Jeetendra Mirchandani um 16:01:
> > but what does it do?
> > can i do without it?
> > 
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Jeetu

> I assume you want to invoke something like SpamAssassin with this
> command rule. Am I right?

I suspect that we just have a confused newbie on our hands.  :)

First of all, you can do without it.  If you were to just delete the .forward
file completely, you would continue to receive email normally.  

The .forward file is how you arrange for mail messages to be delivered
somewhere else, instead of or in addition to going into your inbox.  Very
useful if you have multiple email addresses and wish to arrange for all of the email to wind up in the same account, for instance


The one you sent just arranges for all email messages you receive to be sent
through the command "procmail" (short for "process mail"), which is an email
filter.  You can set up rules (in another file, called ".procmailrc") which
tell procmail what to do, and there's not much it can't do: look for spam (with
the help of yet another program such as SpamAssassin); automatically file
messages into different folders based on the subject, or the sender, or the
address they used to reach you; etc.  Very powerful, very useful . . .
but completely optional.   

-Mark



> 
> You did not say with any word which MTA you are using. Is it Sendmail or
> Postfix or any different? If you are running Sendmail I suggest you call
> SA using MimeDefang.
> 
> The command line does follwing:
> -sets IFS (Internal Field Separator - see man bash) to a simple space
> - and calls procmail by exchanging the shell (see man bash)
> - if the procmail call fails it will exit with error code 75 providing
> the username for whom the .forward call was made.
> 
> Alexander
> 
> 
> -- 
> Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG key 1024D/ED695653 1999-07-13
> Fedora GNU/Linux Core 1 (Yarrow) on Athlon CPU kernel 2.4.22-1.2166.nptl
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>                    [ Γνωθι σ'αυτον - gnothi seauton ]
> 
> 
> 
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Mark REED 		     | CNN Internet Technology
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