the mail trail...sendmail

[Alexander Dalloz]

Am Mo, den 28.03.2005 schrieb rado um 17:54:

> mail is in var/spool/mail/rado i.e. where sendmail planted it.
> now then, is it a deal where, along in thru here, sendmail tells
> procmail it's your turn, do what you want or procmail watching all this
> at this point, after sendmail puts it in the mail folder that procmail
> takes over?

Sendmail passes the mail over to the LDA, in this case we are speaking
about, Procmail. If anything happens then with mail, Sendmail does not
know about. It is Procmail's responsibility to handle the mail
correctly. If doing something wrong in configuring Procmail you can even
loose your mail!
Don't get confused to think Procmail is a filter. Primary it is an
MDA/LDA. It has capability to do things with mail aside from simply
storing it in mbox or Maildir format. This, Procmail can store the mail
at places different from default, based on rules in the procmailrc file.
It too can call other programs to let them process the mail and get it
back at later point. A typical scenario is to let Procmail pass the mail
over to spamc/spamd and let SpamAssassin analyze the mail against spam
criteria, and when SpamAssassin is ready the mail gets back to Procmail
which then stores it according to defined rules. So maybe a mail with >
10 SA spam credits may go to a $HOME/certainly-spam folder, while > 20
SA spam points it may go to /dev/null (electronic nirvana).
Procmail first reads in an existing /etc/procmailrc and then an existing
~/.procmailrc file. If none exist, it simply processes it's defaults.

> does procmail go to /var/spool/mail/rado ...see what's there and filter
> it and send it where you filter it to?

Procmail first processes the mail following either it's own defaults or
according the custom rules from a procmailrc file. The last part is
storage.

> I am really interested in procmail, ummm, to make up recipes in
> procmail, it has to know where your mail is sitting at, I am sure, don't
> have that recipe tutorial in front of me. sure it needs this tho and
> where you want to put mail filtered w/ this or that...from this or
> that...

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~ian/procmail.html
http://laku19.adsl.netsonic.fi/era/procmail/mini-faq.html
http://pm-doc.sourceforge.net/

> my main project here is bottom line, I am not interested in procmail's
> spam filtering techniques right now, I just want procmail and rsync

Procmail is no spam filter.

> together or whatever; I just want to keep whatever mail is in rado's
> maildir to end up on machine "B" which is trying to sync up w/machine
> "A". 

I am not sure about your setup, but I would consider to simply run rsync
frequently by a cronjob. Else let Procmail copy the mail to host B and
on that host let Procmail use formail (not formmail) erase or exchange
the mail header entries resulting from the copy procedure.

> john rose

Alexander


-- 
Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG http://pgp.mit.edu 0xB366A773
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