PROCMAILEX(5) File Formats and Configurations PROCMAILEX(5)
procmailex - procmail rcfile examples
$HOME/.procmailrc examples
For a description of the rcfile format see procmailrc(5).
The weighted scoring technique is described in detail in the
procmailsc(5) man page.
This man page shows several example recipes. For examples of
complete rcfiles you can check the NOTES section in procmail(1), or
look at the example rcfiles in /usr/share/doc/procmail/examples.
Sort out all mail coming from the scuba-dive mailing list into the
mailfolder scubafile (uses the locallockfile scubafile.lock).
:0:
* ^TOscuba
scubafile
Forward all mail from peter about compilers to william (and keep a
copy of it here in petcompil).
:0
* ^From.*peter
* ^Subject:.*compilers
{
:0 c
! william@somewhere.edu
:0
petcompil
}
An equivalent solution that accomplishes the same:
:0 c
* ^From.*peter
* ^Subject:.*compilers
! william@somewhere.edu
:0 A
petcompil
An equivalent, but slightly slower solution that accomplishes the
same:
:0 c
* ^From.*peter
* ^Subject:.*compilers
! william@somewhere.edu
:0
* ^From.*peter
* ^Subject:.*compilers
petcompil
If you are fairly new to procmail and plan to experiment a little bit
it often helps to have a safety net of some sort. Inserting the
following two recipes above all other recipes will make sure that of
all arriving mail always the last 32 messages will be preserved. In
order for it to work as intended, you have to create a directory
named `backup' in $MAILDIR prior to inserting these two recipes.
:0 c
backup
:0 ic
| cd backup && rm -f dummy `ls -t msg.* | sed -e 1,32d`
If your system doesn't generate or generates incorrect leading `From
' lines on every mail, you can fix this by calling up procmail with
the -f- option. To fix the same problem by different means, you
could have inserted the following recipe above all other recipes in
your rcfile. They will filter the header of any mail through formail
which will strip any leading `From ', and automatically regenerates
it subsequently.
:0 fhw
| formail -I "From " -a "From "
Add the headers of all messages that didn't come from the postmaster
to your private header collection (for statistics or mail debugging);
and use the lockfile `headc.lock'. In order to make sure the
lockfile is not removed until the pipe has finished, you have to
specify option `w'; otherwise the lockfile would be removed as soon
as the pipe has accepted the mail.
:0 hwc:
* !^FROM_MAILER
| uncompress headc.Z; cat >>headc; compress headc
Or, if you would use the more efficient gzip instead of compress:
:0 hwc:
* !^FROM_MAILER
| gzip >>headc.gz
Forward all mails shorter than 1000 bytes to my home address (no
lockfile needed on this recipe).
:0
* < 1000
! myname@home
Split up incoming digests from the surfing mailing list into their
individual messages, and store them into surfing, using surfing.lock
as the locallockfile.
:0:
* ^Subject:.*surfing.*Digest
| formail +1 -ds >>surfing
Store everything coming from the postmaster or mailer-daemon (like
bounced mail) into the file postm, using postm.lock as the
locallockfile.
:0:
* ^FROM_MAILER
postm
A simple autoreply recipe. It makes sure that neither mail from any
daemon (like bouncing mail or mail from mailing-lists), nor
autoreplies coming from yourself will be autoreplied to. If this
precaution would not be taken, disaster could result (`ringing'
mail). In order for this recipe to autoreply to all the incoming
mail, you should of course insert it before all other recipes in your
rcfile. However, it is advisable to put it after any recipes that
process the mails from subscribed mailinglists; it generally is not a
good idea to generate autoreplies to mailinglists (yes, the
!^FROM_DAEMON regexp should already catch those, but if the
mailinglist doesn't follow accepted conventions, this might not be
enough).
:0 h c
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: your@own.mail.address
| (formail -r -I"Precedence: junk" \
-A"X-Loop: your@own.mail.address" ; \
echo "Mail received.") | $SENDMAIL -t
A more complicated autoreply recipe that implements the functional
equivalent of the well known vacation(1) program. This recipe is
based on the same principles as the last one (prevent `ringing'
mail). In addition to that however, it maintains a vacation database
by extracting the name of the sender and inserting it in the
vacation.cache file if the name was new (the vacation.cache file is
maintained by formail which will make sure that it always contains
the most recent names, the size of the file is limited to a maximum
of approximately 8192 bytes). If the name was new, an autoreply will
be sent.
As you can see, the following recipe has comments between the
conditions. This is allowed. Do not put comments on the same line
as a condition though.
SHELL=/bin/sh # only needed for older versions of procmail
:0 Whc: vacation.lock
# Perform a quick check to see if the mail was addressed to us
* $^To:.*\<$\LOGNAME\>
# Don't reply to daemons and mailinglists
* !^FROM_DAEMON
# Mail loops are evil
* !^X-Loop: your@own.mail.address
| formail -rD 8192 vacation.cache
:0 ehc # if the name was not in the cache
| (formail -rI"Precedence: junk" \
-A"X-Loop: your@own.mail.address" ; \
echo "I received your mail,"; \
echo "but I won't be back until Monday."; \
echo "-- "; cat $HOME/.signature \
) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
Store all messages concerning TeX in separate, unique filenames, in a
directory named texmail (this directory has to exist); there is no
need to use lockfiles in this case, so we won't.
:0
* (^TO|^Subject:.*)TeX[^t]
texmail
The same as above, except now we store the mails in numbered files
(MH mail folder).
:0
* (^TO|^Subject:.*)TeX[^t]
texmail/.
Or you could file the mail in several directory folders at the same
time. The following recipe will deliver the mail to two MH-folders
and one directory folder. It is actually only one file with two
extra hardlinks.
:0
* (^TO|^Subject:.*)TeX[^t]
texmail/. wordprocessing dtp/.
Store all the messages about meetings in a folder that is in a
directory that changes every month. E.g. if it were January 1994,
the folder would have the name `94-01/meeting' and the locallockfile
would be `94-01/meeting.lock'.
:0:
* meeting
`date +%y-%m`/meeting
The same as above, but, if the `94-01' directory wouldn't have
existed, it is created automatically:
MONTHFOLDER=`date +%y-%m`
:0 Wic
* ? test ! -d $MONTHFOLDER
| mkdir $MONTHFOLDER
:0:
* meeting
${MONTHFOLDER}/meeting
The same as above, but now by slightly different means:
MONTHFOLDER=`date +%y-%m`
DUMMY=`test -d $MONTHFOLDER || mkdir $MONTHFOLDER`
:0:
* meeting
${MONTHFOLDER}/meeting
If you are subscribed to several mailinglists and people cross-post
to some of them, you usually receive several duplicate mails (one
from every list). The following simple recipe eliminates duplicate
mails. It tells formail to keep an 8KB cache file in which it will
store the Message-IDs of the most recent mails you received. Since
Message-IDs are guaranteed to be unique for every new mail, they are
ideally suited to weed out duplicate mails. Simply put the following
recipe at the top of your rcfile, and no duplicate mail will get past
it.
:0 Wh: msgid.lock
| formail -D 8192 msgid.cache
Beware if you have delivery problems in recipes below this one and
procmail tries to requeue the mail, then on the next queue run, this
mail will be considered a duplicate and will be thrown away. For
those not quite so confident in their own scripting capabilities, you
can use the following recipe instead. It puts duplicates in a
separate folder instead of throwing them away. It is up to you to
periodically empty the folder of course.
:0 Whc: msgid.lock
| formail -D 8192 msgid.cache
:0 a:
duplicates
Procmail can deliver to MH folders directly, but, it does not update
the unseen sequences the real MH manages. If you want procmail to
update those as well, use a recipe like the following which will file
everything that contains the word spam in the body of the mail into
an MH folder called spamfold. Note the local lockfile, which is
needed because MH programs do not lock the sequences file.
Asynchronous invocations of MH programs that change the sequences
file may therefore corrupt it or silently lose changes.
Unfortunately, the lockfile doesn't completely solve the problem as
rcvstore could be invoked while `show' or `mark' or some other MH
program is running. This problem is expected to be fixed in some
future version of MH, but until then, you'll have to balance the risk
of lost or corrupt sequences against the benefits of the unseen
sequence.
:0 :spamfold/$LOCKEXT
* B ?? spam
| rcvstore +spamfold
When delivering to emacs folders (i.e., mailfolders managed by any
emacs mail package, e.g., RMAIL or VM) directly, you should use
emacs-compatible lockfiles. The emacs mailers are a bit braindamaged
in that respect, they get very upset if someone delivers to
mailfolders which they already have in their internal buffers. The
following recipe assumes that $HOME equals /home/john.
MAILDIR=Mail
:0:/usr/local/lib/emacs/lock/!home!john!Mail!mailbox
* ^Subject:.*whatever
mailbox
Alternatively, you can have procmail deliver into its own set of
mailboxes, which you then periodically empty and copy over to your
emacs files using movemail. Movemail uses mailbox.lock local
lockfiles per mailbox. This actually is the preferred mode of
operation in conjunction with procmail.
To extract certain headers from a mail and put them into environment
variables you can use any of the following constructs:
SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject:` # regular field
FROM=`formail -rt -xTo:` # special case
:0 h # alternate method
KEYWORDS=| formail -xKeywords:
If you are using temporary files in a procmailrc file, and want to
make sure that they are removed just before procmail exits, you could
use something along the lines of:
TEMPORARY=$HOME/tmp/pmail.$$
TRAP="/bin/rm -f $TEMPORARY"
The TRAP keyword can also be used to change the exitcode of procmail.
I.e. if you want procmail to return an exitcode of `1' instead of its
regular exitcodes, you could use:
EXITCODE=""
TRAP="exit 1;" # The trailing semi-colon is important
# since exit is not a standalone program
Or, if the exitcode does not need to depend on the programs run from
the TRAP, you can use a mere:
EXITCODE=1
The following recipe prints every incoming mail that looks like a
postscript file.
:0 Bb
* ^^%!
| lpr
The following recipe does the same, but is a bit more selective. It
only prints the postscript file if it comes from the print-server.
The first condition matches only if it is found in the header. The
second condition only matches at the start of the body.
:0 b
* ^From[ :].*print-server
* B ?? ^^%!
| lpr
The same as above, but now by slightly different means:
:0
* ^From[ :].*print-server
{
:0 B b
* ^^%!
| lpr
}
Likewise:
:0 HB b
* ^^(.+$)*From[ :].*print-server
* ^^(.+$)*^%!
| lpr
Suppose you have two accounts, you use both accounts regularly, but
they are in very distinct places (i.e., you can only read mail that
arrived at either one of the accounts). You would like to forward
mail arriving at account one to account two, and the other way
around. The first thing that comes to mind is using .forward files
at both sites; this won't work of course, since you will be creating
a mail loop. This mail loop can be avoided by inserting the
following recipe in front of all other recipes in the
$HOME/.procmailrc files on both sites. If you make sure that you add
the same X-Loop: field at both sites, mail can now safely be
forwarded to the other account from either of them.
:0 c
* !^X-Loop: yourname@your.main.mail.address
| formail -A "X-Loop: yourname@your.main.mail.address" | \
$SENDMAIL -oi yourname@the.other.account
If someone sends you a mail with the word `retrieve' in the subject,
the following will automatically send back the contents of info_file
to the sender. Like in all recipes where we send mail, we watch out
for mail loops.
:0
* !^From +YOUR_USERNAME
* !^Subject:.*Re:
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* ^Subject:.*retrieve
| (formail -r ; cat info_file) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
Now follows an example for a very simple fileserver accessible by
mail. For more demanding applications, I suggest you take a look at
SmartList (available from the same place as the procmail
distribution). As listed, this fileserver sends back at most one
file per request, it ignores the body of incoming mails, the Subject:
line has to look like "Subject: send file the_file_you_want" (the
blanks are significant), it does not return files that have names
starting with a dot, nor does it allow files to be retrieved that are
outside the fileserver directory tree (if you decide to munge this
example, make sure you do not inadvertently loosen this last
restriction).
:0
* ^Subject: send file [0-9a-z]
* !^X-Loop: yourname@your.main.mail.address
* !^Subject:.*Re:
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^Subject: send file .*[/.]\.
{
MAILDIR=$HOME/fileserver # chdir to the fileserver directory
:0 fhw # reverse mailheader and extract name
* ^Subject: send file \/[^ ]*
| formail -rA "X-Loop: yourname@your.main.mail.address"
FILE="$MATCH" # the requested filename
:0 ah
| cat - ./$FILE 2>&1 | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
}
The following example preconverts all plain-text mail arriving in
certain encoded MIME formats into a more compact 8-bit format which
can be used and displayed more easily by most programs. The
mimencode(1) program is part of Nathaniel Borenstein's metamail
package.
:0
* ^Content-Type: *text/plain
{
:0 fbw
* ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: *quoted-printable
| mimencode -u -q
:0 Afhw
| formail -I "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit"
:0 fbw
* ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: *base64
| mimencode -u -b
:0 Afhw
| formail -I "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit"
}
The following one is rather exotic, but it only serves to demonstrate
a feature. Suppose you have a file in your HOME directory called
".urgent", and the (one) person named in that file is the sender of
an incoming mail, you'd like that mail to be stored in
$MAILDIR/urgent instead of in any of the normal mailfolders it would
have been sorted in. Then this is what you could do (beware, the
filelength of $HOME/.urgent should be well below $LINEBUF, increase
LINEBUF if necessary):
URGMATCH=`cat $HOME/.urgent`
:0:
* $^From.*${URGMATCH}
urgent
An entirely different application for procmail would be to
conditionally apply filters to a certain (outgoing) text or mail. A
typical example would be a filter through which you pipe all outgoing
mail, in order to make sure that it will be MIME encoded only if it
needs to be. I.e. in this case you could start procmail in the
middle of a pipe like:
cat newtext | procmail ./mimeconvert | mail chris@where.ever
The mimeconvert rcfile could contain something like (the =0x80= and
=0xff= should be substituted with the real 8-bit characters):
DEFAULT=| # pipe to stdout instead of
# delivering mail as usual
:0 Bfbw
* [=0x80=-=0xff=]
| mimencode -q
:0 Afhw
| formail -I 'MIME-Version: 1.0' \
-I 'Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1' \
-I 'Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable'
procmail(1), procmailrc(5), procmailsc(5), sh(1), csh(1), mail(1),
mailx(1), uucp(1), aliases(5), sendmail(8), egrep(1), grep(1),
biff(1), comsat(8), mimencode(1), lockfile(1), formail(1)
Stephen R. van den Berg
<srb@cuci.nl>
BuGless PROCMAILEX(5)
NAME
procmailex - procmail rcfile examples
SYNOPSIS
$HOME/.procmailrc examples
DESCRIPTION
For a description of the rcfile format see procmailrc(5).
The weighted scoring technique is described in detail in the
procmailsc(5) man page.
This man page shows several example recipes. For examples of
complete rcfiles you can check the NOTES section in procmail(1), or
look at the example rcfiles in /usr/share/doc/procmail/examples.
EXAMPLES
Sort out all mail coming from the scuba-dive mailing list into the
mailfolder scubafile (uses the locallockfile scubafile.lock).
:0:
* ^TOscuba
scubafile
Forward all mail from peter about compilers to william (and keep a
copy of it here in petcompil).
:0
* ^From.*peter
* ^Subject:.*compilers
{
:0 c
! william@somewhere.edu
:0
petcompil
}
An equivalent solution that accomplishes the same:
:0 c
* ^From.*peter
* ^Subject:.*compilers
! william@somewhere.edu
:0 A
petcompil
An equivalent, but slightly slower solution that accomplishes the
same:
:0 c
* ^From.*peter
* ^Subject:.*compilers
! william@somewhere.edu
:0
* ^From.*peter
* ^Subject:.*compilers
petcompil
If you are fairly new to procmail and plan to experiment a little bit
it often helps to have a safety net of some sort. Inserting the
following two recipes above all other recipes will make sure that of
all arriving mail always the last 32 messages will be preserved. In
order for it to work as intended, you have to create a directory
named `backup' in $MAILDIR prior to inserting these two recipes.
:0 c
backup
:0 ic
| cd backup && rm -f dummy `ls -t msg.* | sed -e 1,32d`
If your system doesn't generate or generates incorrect leading `From
' lines on every mail, you can fix this by calling up procmail with
the -f- option. To fix the same problem by different means, you
could have inserted the following recipe above all other recipes in
your rcfile. They will filter the header of any mail through formail
which will strip any leading `From ', and automatically regenerates
it subsequently.
:0 fhw
| formail -I "From " -a "From "
Add the headers of all messages that didn't come from the postmaster
to your private header collection (for statistics or mail debugging);
and use the lockfile `headc.lock'. In order to make sure the
lockfile is not removed until the pipe has finished, you have to
specify option `w'; otherwise the lockfile would be removed as soon
as the pipe has accepted the mail.
:0 hwc:
* !^FROM_MAILER
| uncompress headc.Z; cat >>headc; compress headc
Or, if you would use the more efficient gzip instead of compress:
:0 hwc:
* !^FROM_MAILER
| gzip >>headc.gz
Forward all mails shorter than 1000 bytes to my home address (no
lockfile needed on this recipe).
:0
* < 1000
! myname@home
Split up incoming digests from the surfing mailing list into their
individual messages, and store them into surfing, using surfing.lock
as the locallockfile.
:0:
* ^Subject:.*surfing.*Digest
| formail +1 -ds >>surfing
Store everything coming from the postmaster or mailer-daemon (like
bounced mail) into the file postm, using postm.lock as the
locallockfile.
:0:
* ^FROM_MAILER
postm
A simple autoreply recipe. It makes sure that neither mail from any
daemon (like bouncing mail or mail from mailing-lists), nor
autoreplies coming from yourself will be autoreplied to. If this
precaution would not be taken, disaster could result (`ringing'
mail). In order for this recipe to autoreply to all the incoming
mail, you should of course insert it before all other recipes in your
rcfile. However, it is advisable to put it after any recipes that
process the mails from subscribed mailinglists; it generally is not a
good idea to generate autoreplies to mailinglists (yes, the
!^FROM_DAEMON regexp should already catch those, but if the
mailinglist doesn't follow accepted conventions, this might not be
enough).
:0 h c
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: your@own.mail.address
| (formail -r -I"Precedence: junk" \
-A"X-Loop: your@own.mail.address" ; \
echo "Mail received.") | $SENDMAIL -t
A more complicated autoreply recipe that implements the functional
equivalent of the well known vacation(1) program. This recipe is
based on the same principles as the last one (prevent `ringing'
mail). In addition to that however, it maintains a vacation database
by extracting the name of the sender and inserting it in the
vacation.cache file if the name was new (the vacation.cache file is
maintained by formail which will make sure that it always contains
the most recent names, the size of the file is limited to a maximum
of approximately 8192 bytes). If the name was new, an autoreply will
be sent.
As you can see, the following recipe has comments between the
conditions. This is allowed. Do not put comments on the same line
as a condition though.
SHELL=/bin/sh # only needed for older versions of procmail
:0 Whc: vacation.lock
# Perform a quick check to see if the mail was addressed to us
* $^To:.*\<$\LOGNAME\>
# Don't reply to daemons and mailinglists
* !^FROM_DAEMON
# Mail loops are evil
* !^X-Loop: your@own.mail.address
| formail -rD 8192 vacation.cache
:0 ehc # if the name was not in the cache
| (formail -rI"Precedence: junk" \
-A"X-Loop: your@own.mail.address" ; \
echo "I received your mail,"; \
echo "but I won't be back until Monday."; \
echo "-- "; cat $HOME/.signature \
) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
Store all messages concerning TeX in separate, unique filenames, in a
directory named texmail (this directory has to exist); there is no
need to use lockfiles in this case, so we won't.
:0
* (^TO|^Subject:.*)TeX[^t]
texmail
The same as above, except now we store the mails in numbered files
(MH mail folder).
:0
* (^TO|^Subject:.*)TeX[^t]
texmail/.
Or you could file the mail in several directory folders at the same
time. The following recipe will deliver the mail to two MH-folders
and one directory folder. It is actually only one file with two
extra hardlinks.
:0
* (^TO|^Subject:.*)TeX[^t]
texmail/. wordprocessing dtp/.
Store all the messages about meetings in a folder that is in a
directory that changes every month. E.g. if it were January 1994,
the folder would have the name `94-01/meeting' and the locallockfile
would be `94-01/meeting.lock'.
:0:
* meeting
`date +%y-%m`/meeting
The same as above, but, if the `94-01' directory wouldn't have
existed, it is created automatically:
MONTHFOLDER=`date +%y-%m`
:0 Wic
* ? test ! -d $MONTHFOLDER
| mkdir $MONTHFOLDER
:0:
* meeting
${MONTHFOLDER}/meeting
The same as above, but now by slightly different means:
MONTHFOLDER=`date +%y-%m`
DUMMY=`test -d $MONTHFOLDER || mkdir $MONTHFOLDER`
:0:
* meeting
${MONTHFOLDER}/meeting
If you are subscribed to several mailinglists and people cross-post
to some of them, you usually receive several duplicate mails (one
from every list). The following simple recipe eliminates duplicate
mails. It tells formail to keep an 8KB cache file in which it will
store the Message-IDs of the most recent mails you received. Since
Message-IDs are guaranteed to be unique for every new mail, they are
ideally suited to weed out duplicate mails. Simply put the following
recipe at the top of your rcfile, and no duplicate mail will get past
it.
:0 Wh: msgid.lock
| formail -D 8192 msgid.cache
Beware if you have delivery problems in recipes below this one and
procmail tries to requeue the mail, then on the next queue run, this
mail will be considered a duplicate and will be thrown away. For
those not quite so confident in their own scripting capabilities, you
can use the following recipe instead. It puts duplicates in a
separate folder instead of throwing them away. It is up to you to
periodically empty the folder of course.
:0 Whc: msgid.lock
| formail -D 8192 msgid.cache
:0 a:
duplicates
Procmail can deliver to MH folders directly, but, it does not update
the unseen sequences the real MH manages. If you want procmail to
update those as well, use a recipe like the following which will file
everything that contains the word spam in the body of the mail into
an MH folder called spamfold. Note the local lockfile, which is
needed because MH programs do not lock the sequences file.
Asynchronous invocations of MH programs that change the sequences
file may therefore corrupt it or silently lose changes.
Unfortunately, the lockfile doesn't completely solve the problem as
rcvstore could be invoked while `show' or `mark' or some other MH
program is running. This problem is expected to be fixed in some
future version of MH, but until then, you'll have to balance the risk
of lost or corrupt sequences against the benefits of the unseen
sequence.
:0 :spamfold/$LOCKEXT
* B ?? spam
| rcvstore +spamfold
When delivering to emacs folders (i.e., mailfolders managed by any
emacs mail package, e.g., RMAIL or VM) directly, you should use
emacs-compatible lockfiles. The emacs mailers are a bit braindamaged
in that respect, they get very upset if someone delivers to
mailfolders which they already have in their internal buffers. The
following recipe assumes that $HOME equals /home/john.
MAILDIR=Mail
:0:/usr/local/lib/emacs/lock/!home!john!Mail!mailbox
* ^Subject:.*whatever
mailbox
Alternatively, you can have procmail deliver into its own set of
mailboxes, which you then periodically empty and copy over to your
emacs files using movemail. Movemail uses mailbox.lock local
lockfiles per mailbox. This actually is the preferred mode of
operation in conjunction with procmail.
To extract certain headers from a mail and put them into environment
variables you can use any of the following constructs:
SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject:` # regular field
FROM=`formail -rt -xTo:` # special case
:0 h # alternate method
KEYWORDS=| formail -xKeywords:
If you are using temporary files in a procmailrc file, and want to
make sure that they are removed just before procmail exits, you could
use something along the lines of:
TEMPORARY=$HOME/tmp/pmail.$$
TRAP="/bin/rm -f $TEMPORARY"
The TRAP keyword can also be used to change the exitcode of procmail.
I.e. if you want procmail to return an exitcode of `1' instead of its
regular exitcodes, you could use:
EXITCODE=""
TRAP="exit 1;" # The trailing semi-colon is important
# since exit is not a standalone program
Or, if the exitcode does not need to depend on the programs run from
the TRAP, you can use a mere:
EXITCODE=1
The following recipe prints every incoming mail that looks like a
postscript file.
:0 Bb
* ^^%!
| lpr
The following recipe does the same, but is a bit more selective. It
only prints the postscript file if it comes from the print-server.
The first condition matches only if it is found in the header. The
second condition only matches at the start of the body.
:0 b
* ^From[ :].*print-server
* B ?? ^^%!
| lpr
The same as above, but now by slightly different means:
:0
* ^From[ :].*print-server
{
:0 B b
* ^^%!
| lpr
}
Likewise:
:0 HB b
* ^^(.+$)*From[ :].*print-server
* ^^(.+$)*^%!
| lpr
Suppose you have two accounts, you use both accounts regularly, but
they are in very distinct places (i.e., you can only read mail that
arrived at either one of the accounts). You would like to forward
mail arriving at account one to account two, and the other way
around. The first thing that comes to mind is using .forward files
at both sites; this won't work of course, since you will be creating
a mail loop. This mail loop can be avoided by inserting the
following recipe in front of all other recipes in the
$HOME/.procmailrc files on both sites. If you make sure that you add
the same X-Loop: field at both sites, mail can now safely be
forwarded to the other account from either of them.
:0 c
* !^X-Loop: yourname@your.main.mail.address
| formail -A "X-Loop: yourname@your.main.mail.address" | \
$SENDMAIL -oi yourname@the.other.account
If someone sends you a mail with the word `retrieve' in the subject,
the following will automatically send back the contents of info_file
to the sender. Like in all recipes where we send mail, we watch out
for mail loops.
:0
* !^From +YOUR_USERNAME
* !^Subject:.*Re:
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* ^Subject:.*retrieve
| (formail -r ; cat info_file) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
Now follows an example for a very simple fileserver accessible by
mail. For more demanding applications, I suggest you take a look at
SmartList (available from the same place as the procmail
distribution). As listed, this fileserver sends back at most one
file per request, it ignores the body of incoming mails, the Subject:
line has to look like "Subject: send file the_file_you_want" (the
blanks are significant), it does not return files that have names
starting with a dot, nor does it allow files to be retrieved that are
outside the fileserver directory tree (if you decide to munge this
example, make sure you do not inadvertently loosen this last
restriction).
:0
* ^Subject: send file [0-9a-z]
* !^X-Loop: yourname@your.main.mail.address
* !^Subject:.*Re:
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^Subject: send file .*[/.]\.
{
MAILDIR=$HOME/fileserver # chdir to the fileserver directory
:0 fhw # reverse mailheader and extract name
* ^Subject: send file \/[^ ]*
| formail -rA "X-Loop: yourname@your.main.mail.address"
FILE="$MATCH" # the requested filename
:0 ah
| cat - ./$FILE 2>&1 | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
}
The following example preconverts all plain-text mail arriving in
certain encoded MIME formats into a more compact 8-bit format which
can be used and displayed more easily by most programs. The
mimencode(1) program is part of Nathaniel Borenstein's metamail
package.
:0
* ^Content-Type: *text/plain
{
:0 fbw
* ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: *quoted-printable
| mimencode -u -q
:0 Afhw
| formail -I "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit"
:0 fbw
* ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: *base64
| mimencode -u -b
:0 Afhw
| formail -I "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit"
}
The following one is rather exotic, but it only serves to demonstrate
a feature. Suppose you have a file in your HOME directory called
".urgent", and the (one) person named in that file is the sender of
an incoming mail, you'd like that mail to be stored in
$MAILDIR/urgent instead of in any of the normal mailfolders it would
have been sorted in. Then this is what you could do (beware, the
filelength of $HOME/.urgent should be well below $LINEBUF, increase
LINEBUF if necessary):
URGMATCH=`cat $HOME/.urgent`
:0:
* $^From.*${URGMATCH}
urgent
An entirely different application for procmail would be to
conditionally apply filters to a certain (outgoing) text or mail. A
typical example would be a filter through which you pipe all outgoing
mail, in order to make sure that it will be MIME encoded only if it
needs to be. I.e. in this case you could start procmail in the
middle of a pipe like:
cat newtext | procmail ./mimeconvert | mail chris@where.ever
The mimeconvert rcfile could contain something like (the =0x80= and
=0xff= should be substituted with the real 8-bit characters):
DEFAULT=| # pipe to stdout instead of
# delivering mail as usual
:0 Bfbw
* [=0x80=-=0xff=]
| mimencode -q
:0 Afhw
| formail -I 'MIME-Version: 1.0' \
-I 'Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1' \
-I 'Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable'
SEE ALSO
procmail(1), procmailrc(5), procmailsc(5), sh(1), csh(1), mail(1),
mailx(1), uucp(1), aliases(5), sendmail(8), egrep(1), grep(1),
biff(1), comsat(8), mimencode(1), lockfile(1), formail(1)
AUTHORS
Stephen R. van den Berg
<srb@cuci.nl>
BuGless PROCMAILEX(5)