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 part of the
procmail source distribution (procmail*/examples/?proc-
mailrc).
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 accom-
plishes 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 two recipes above all other recipes in your
rcfile. They will filter the header of any mail through
formail which will strip any leading `From ', and automat-
ically 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 statis-
tics 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 surf-
ing, using surfing.lock as the locallockfile.
:0:
* ^Subject:.*surfing.*Digest
| formail +1 -ds >>surfing
Store everything coming from the postmaster or mailer-dae-
mon (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 mail-
inglists; 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 -A"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) pro-
gram. 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 vaca-
tion.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 aproximately 8192 bytes).
If the name was new, an autoreply will be sent.
SHELL=/bin/sh # for other shells, this might need adjustment
:0 Whc: vacation.lock
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: your@own.mail.address
| formail -rD 8192 vacation.cache
:0 ehc # if the name was not in the cache
| (formail -rA"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 num-
bered 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 actu-
ally 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/meet-
ing' 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 ic
* ? 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 sim-
ple recipe eliminates duplicate mails. It tells formail
to keep an 8KB cache file in which it will store the Mes-
sage-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
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 $HOME equals /home/john.
MAILDIR=Mail
:0:/usr/local/lib/emacs/lock/!home!john!Mail!mailbox
* ^Subject:.*whatever
mailbox
Alternatively, you can have procmail deliver into its own
set of mailboxes, which you then periodically empty and
copy over to your emacs files using movemail. Movemail
uses mailbox.lock local lockfiles per mailbox.
To extract certain headers from a mail and put them into
environment variables you can use any of the following
constructs:
SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject:` # regular field
FROM=`formail -rt -xTo:` # special case
:0 h # alternate method
KEYWORDS=| formail -xKeywords:
If you are using temporary files in a procmailrc file, and
want to make sure that they are removed just before proc-
mail exits, you could use something along the lines of:
TEMPORARY=$HOME/tmp/pmail.$$
TRAP="/bin/rm -f $TEMPORARY"
The TRAP keyword can also be used to change the exitcode
of procmail. I.e. if you want procmail to return an exit-
code of `1' instead of its regular exitcodes, you could
use:
EXITCODE=""
TRAP="exit 1;" # The trailing semi-colon is important
# since exit is not a standalone program
Or, if the exitcode does not need to depend on the pro-
grams run from the TRAP, you can use a mere:
EXITCODE=1
The following recipe prints every incoming mail that looks
like a postscript file.
:0 Bb
* ^^%!
| lpr
The following recipe does the same, but is a bit more
selective. It only prints the postscript file if it comes
from the print-server. The first condition matches only
if it is found in the header. The second condition only
matches at the start of the body.
:0 b
* ^From[ :].*print-server
* B ?? ^^%!
| lpr
The same as above, but now by slightly different means:
:0
* ^From[ :].*print-server
{
:0 B b
* ^^%!
| lpr
}
Likewise:
:0 HB b
* ^^(.+$)*From[ :].*print-server
* ^^(.+$)*^%!
| lpr
Suppose you have two accounts, you use both accounts regu-
larly, 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) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
Now follows an example for a very simple fileserver acces-
sible by mail. For more demanding applications, I suggest
you take a look at SmartList (available from the same
place as the procmail distribution). As listed, this
fileserver sends back at most one file per request, it
ignores the body of incoming mails, the Subject: line has
to look like "Subject: send file the_file_you_want" (the
blanks are significant), it does not return files that
have names starting with a dot, nor does it allow files to
be retrieved that are outside the fileserver directory
tree (if you decide to munge this example, make sure you
do not inadvertently loosen this last restriction).
:0
* ^Subject: send file [0-9a-z]
* !^X-Loop: yourname@your.main.mail.address
* !^Subject:.*Re:
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^Subject: send file .*[/.]\.
{
MAILDIR=$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 com-
pact 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 B:
* $^From.*${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) binmail(1) uucp(1) aliases(5)
sendmail(8) egrep(1) grep(1) biff(1) comsat(8)
mimencode(1) lockfile(1) formail(1)
AUTHOR
Stephen R. van den Berg at RWTH-Aachen, Germany
berg@pool.informatik.rwth-aachen.de