About Procmail

Table of Contents

• What is Procmail?
• How to Setup Procmail
• .procmailrc
• Procmail Recipes
• Recipe Metacharaters
• Mailstat

What is Procmail?

Procmail tutorials:

Bug reports should be sent to bug@procmail.org

How to Setup Procmail

1. Modify your .forward file

Incoming mail to your account will always check first for a .forward file before going to your mail directory. If one is found, then anything in the file will be executed first. If you would like for Procmail to handle your mail sorting, then add this line to your .forward file(create one if you don't have one).

"exec | procmail" (with double quotes)

2. Create .procmailrc After you have added the exec command to your .forward, you need to tell Procmail what to do with your mail. This is done in the .procmailrc file(that you will create)through the use of "recipes."

.procmailrc

The first line in the file tells procmail where its logfile is located. This is what mine looks like:

LOGFILE=$HOME/Procmail/log

So, my logfile is located in a directory called Procmail, which is in my home directory, and the file itself is called log. The next line in the .procmailrc file sets the procmail MAILDIR environment variable to the directory of where your mailboxes are stored. If you use elm and pine, then set your MAILDIR like this:

MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail

You can also add the line VERBOSE=no to minimize logging and save space.

Finally, you add your recipes.

Procmail Recipes

A recipe always begins with a line with :0: on it. The next Line(s) specify the conditions to be met, and the last line is the action to take place.

Here is a good one to use for testing:

:O:
* ^From.*username
IN.testing

Replace "username" with your username and save and exit the file. Test the recipe out by sending an email to yourself (From within the system so that your username matches and satisfies the recipe condition). Then check your folders to see is there is now one called IN.testing with the email you just sent in it.

Now you can create recipes to sort your mail however you like. You can even sort mail directly to the "trashbin." Say, for instance, you never want to read anything Sprague has to say to you:

This recipe will delete all mail sent to you from user "sprague":

:0:
* ^From.*sprague
/dev/null

If you are on a mailing list then you might want to sort all mail from that list into its own folder-- or you could sort mail from multiple lists all into one folder. E.g., if you are on both the cyberlaw@cs.fsu.edu and cop4531@cs.fsu.edu lists, then you could sort all mail from those lists into a "classes" folder like this:

:0:
* ^(from: | cc: | to:).*(cyberlaw | cop4531)
classes

See also the section Using the Extraction Operator and $MATCH to Sort Mailing List Messages in
Procmail Quickstart

Recipe Metacharacters

The difference between a word and a string:

If you search for the string test, then procmail searches for any occurrence of those characters in that order, including within other strings. If, on the other hand, you told it to search for the WORD test then it would only look for exactly that string by itself. For example:

The STRING test would be found in the heading

Subject: testing

but the WORD test would not. It would, however, be found in

Subject: test!

One more thing: A word can only contain letters, digits, and underscores, so any whitespace or other characters(such as the ! above) serve as delimiters.

Mailstat

To get help on mailstat, type:

mailstat -h

To run mailstat, type:

mailstat $HOME/Procmail/log

Where $HOME/Procmail/log is the value of your LOGFILE variable in .procmailrc. Running the command moves your log file to log.old and displays a tabular description of your log similar the following:

  Total  Number Folder
  -----  ------ ------
   9964    4    IN.testing
   3408    1    classes
  -----  ------
  13372    5

Unless you delete your logfile from time to time it will keep growing larger and larger.