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/?procmailrc).
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 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
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 -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) 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 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 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 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 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
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 $HOME equals /home/john.
MAILDIR=Mail
:0:/usr/local/lib/emacs/lock/!home!john!Mail!mailbox
* ^Subject:.*whatever
mailbox
Alternatively, you can have procmail deliver into its own
set of mailboxes, which you then periodically empty and copy
over to your emacs files using movemail. Movemail uses
mailbox.lock local lockfiles per mailbox.
To extract certain headers from a mail and put them into
environment variables you can use any of the following
constructs:
SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject:` # regular field
FROM=`formail -rt -xTo:` # special case
:0 h # alternate method
KEYWORDS=| formail -xKeywords:
If you are using temporary files in a procmailrc file, and
want to make sure that they are removed just before procmail
exits, you could use something along the lines of:
TEMPORARY=$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 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