> The bad part is that in order for Mutt to work as a high-volume > mailer, you need to use procmail, which has the suckingest syntax > I ever saw in a rc-file. I know there are some replacements for > procmail, such as maildrop, but they somehow all seem to inherit > the syntax stupidity from procmail.
Another poor soul who saw the very fancy stuff you can do with some strange, complicated rules and now thinks they all have to be that way... If all you want to do is sort mail to different folders based upon content, all it takes is three short lines. Here's an example from my .procmailrc: :0 * ^(From|Return-Path|To):*.(Cbmccandless|skfan127) Personal-Cheryl/ Here's the explanation... The first line indicates the start of a recipe that does not use a lock. I use the maildir structure. If you used the traditional Unix mail spool structure, then you would need a lock which would be indicated by adding another ":" after the "0". The second line is the filter. The "* " indicates that this is the filter expression. Everything after that is a regular expression. If it matches a portion of an email, the email is acted upon in accordance with the rule(s) in the third line. This filter is simply looking for any email with the userids of "Cbmccandless" or "skfan127" in the "From:", "Return-Path:", or "To:" header fields. The third line tells what to do with matched emails. You can get very fancy here if you wish. The admin account at my last contract had a recipe that watched for emails from the intrusion detection system indicating a possible security breach. When such an email was received, a copy was forwarded to all the system admins, their pagers were triggered and caused to display 911, and the breached system was disconnected from the net. Obviously I have nothing so fancy here. Because the most common action is to place the email in a folder, you tell procmail to do so by simply giving the folder name. If it has a trailing "/", procmail will use the maildir format, otherwise it will use the mbox format. As you can see, it's nice and simple. In fact, no harder than the filtering built into some email clients. On the other hand, it will allow you to create some very powerful filters and rules that you cannot do with any email client's built in filtering. You can literally do anything to your email using procmail if you take the time to learn it's advanced features. One of the top list servers used is nothing more than a bunch of procmail filters and rules. It's the advanced stuff that seems to freak people out although most would never have any reason to use it. -- Thomas M. Beaudry k8la / ys1ztm [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
