On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 11:42:14AM -0800, Kurt Lieber wrote: > On Thursday 29 November 2001 11:22 am, Dave Sherohman wrote: > > That's something I've wondered about for a while... I've found > > exim's .forward filtering to be more than adequate for anything I've > > ever wanted to do (and a lot more human-readable to boot), but you > > seem to be implying that it's less capable than procmail. What can > > procmail do that exim can't? > > I meant "cruel" in the sense that exim's filtering syntax is Shakespeare > compared to procmail's butchery. > > I'm not sure I understand all the differences between exim and procmail > filtering, but here's my limited understanding: > > * exim allows you to filter without changing the envelope sender -- not sure > if procmail can do this. > * exim filtering is better at detecting (and preventing) duplicate messages > among multiple users > * procmail can pipe messages to other programs and use the return code to do > futher filtering. Exim can pipe to external programs as well, but can't > (AFAIK) use the return code in any way. > > Basically, exim is set up to deliver messages, so its filtering is designed > with message delivery as the ultimate goal. Procmail is more of a swiss army > knife and has a bit more flexibility. The two are certainly not mutually > exclusive -- one can augment the other. > Hope you don't mind the interruption. You may have noticed my slew of postings about difficulties with sorting mail. I read your reponse to mean that I may not even require the services of procmail, as I ~am~ using exim as my MTA. Is this correct? I just want fairly simple pre-sorting of mail before I read it with mutt.
> BTW, I highly recommend the O'Reilly exim book if you're at all interested in > learning more about exim. I use it most/all of the time when I have exim > questions. > No doubt a very helpful book. Unfortunately this "capital" city on the east caost of Canada has just discovered that M$ is ~not~ the only OS. I'd have to order said book, and wait 4 - 6 weeks for delivery of it. Not sure I can go through another few weeks of this dilemma. > hth > > --kurt It certainly gave me a new direction to look into. Thanks muchly for the input. C. Masters
