26.13 Procmail: Filter and Split Incoming Email
REVIEW
The procmail package provides a powerful mechanism for filtering incoming email, to split email that meet certain criteria into separate folders, to forward different emails on to other users, and to add extra headers to your email (e.g., X-Label headers to classify your email into categories you might define).
The procmail application will be invoked on any email
that arrives for you by adding the following to your .forward
file:
At the heart of procmail is the .procmailrc
file. This contains all the rules that are applied to an email to
determine what should happen to that email.
There is potential for procmail to be invoked in rapid
succession, and thus if two procmails try to write to the
one file there could be a problem. Thus procmail uses
lock files to ensure this does not happen. A lock file will slow
procmail down ever so slightly, so it is kept as an option
specified in the configuration file (.procmailrc) rather than
a default.
We can use formail to process an mbox format mail file (containing a collection of email messages) to pipe each message through our procmail processing:
This is only needed if you already have quite a few emails in there, and want to put them through the filter processing.
Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
