I want to write a shell script to move messages from a mail spool inbox to a number of folders. So if there are messages in the inbox, the first message should go to folder1, second message should go to folder2, etc.
Your first hurdle is that the mail spool is most likely a single file with all of the messages concatenated together; you'll need to split it into separate messages. There are a few ways to do this:
1) Don't deliver the mail into the spool file in the first place. Set up a .forward file which causes the mail to be piped into some other program, such as procmail.
2) Use the formail utility (which comes with procmail) to split the spool file into separate messages, which are similarly piped into another program.
3) Write a completely custom utility, in perl or python perhaps, which can parse the spool into separate messages. I assume this isn't an option for you.
Using method 1 or 2, a simple way to get what you want is to pipe the messages into procmail and have procmail deliver them into an MH-format mailbox. An MH mailbox is a directory where the messages are files with sequential numbers for names; this is different from the maildir format. Basically, you'd deliver the mail into the MH directory using procmail (or formail + procmail), then sweep the directory using a simple shell script that moves each file to a mailbox based on the file's number.
So, one way to accomplish this is as follows. First you'd create a .forward file in the home directory of the spool file's owner, containing the following:
|procmail
This pipes the user's messages into procmail instead of delivering them to the spool file.
You'd also create a directory such as "/home/user/mhinbox" to serve as the inbox, and a .procmailrc containing something like this:
:0
/home/user/mhinbox/.This writes each message to a file in the directory, using a sequential numeric filename.
Finally, you'd run a script like the following from cron every fifteen minutes or whatever:
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/user/mhinbox || exit 1 mbox[0]=/path/to/mbox1
mbox[1]=/path/to/mbox2
...
mboxcount=5 for file in *
do
box=${mbox[$file % mboxcount]}
# deliver $file into $box
done
--
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