To keep the Procmail FAQ at a manageable size, I've opted to list only the most central web links in the FAQ itself. This page, then, is more of a kitchen-sink collection.
The URL of this page is http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/links.html and it is mirrored at the following sites:
Please use a mirror if you can.
.procmailrc
files, musings on mail filtering, etc)
You will also doubtlessly find a few broken links. Please mail me about those so I can fix them, for the surfing pleasure of coming generations.
Version information:
$Id: links.html,v 1.2 2009/01/07 12:04:02 gsutter Exp $
The
version history
details recent developments
Just to keep this link collection reasonably self-contained, here is a fleshed-out repeat of the central links mentioned in the FAQ itself.
I also try to include links to "competing" link collections. I do not wish to hijack information from other sites and thus I hope you will check out what these other collections have to offer. Please mail me if you have links to other collections you think I should include.
procmail-dev
mailing list.
Subject:
line
and you'll get
[somewhat terse] instructions
for how to access the archive by e-mail.)
README
HISTORY
Version history for Procmail, incomplete
INSTALL
examples/advanced
So far, only a handful. Please mail me if you learn about others.
You can probably find some other useful sites by starting with this
canned Alta Vista search for "procmail".
This merely attempts to strip out sites which have archives of the
Procmail mailing list and/or otherwise a lot of Procmail material, on
the theory that if you've looked around a little bit you will already
have seen the stuff they can offer. What is left then is a very disparate
collection of lone Procmail-related pages
(presently, some 3,000 hits).
In and of itself, this is not particularly useful; you should
refine the search to suit your needs before you actually use it.
(Of course, in many situations, the mailing list archives contain
exactly the stuff you're looking for. This one is primarily useful if
you've been reading the Procmail mailing list yourself and are
looking for information you know is not in the archives. I managed to
find a couple of the Rich and Famous pages and a few of the tutorials
using variants of this. Caveat Utilitor: A lot of the stuff you find
will be very old.)
There are several good tutorials for Unix newbies, although many of them are more or less tied to the site where they were written. For the most part, these tutorials do not presuppose a lot of knowledge about Unix or mail handling on Unix.
None of the material in the "howto" section is exactly rocket science, either -- let's just say it contains a lot less of this "pause now if your head hurts already" nonsense.
If you're only interested in spam filtering, check out the spam-fighting section below instead.
:-)
See also the next section, "Pearls from the Mailing List", for some practical examples of how to accomplish slightly tricky things with Procmail.
The Procmail pages in the "Rich and Famous" section (below) also contain suitable working examples, including several approaches to refusing junk mail, vacation recipes, ftp-by-mail servers, etc.
The Mini-FAQ basically assumes you are somewhat familiar with the manuals and with "normal" stuff people do with Procmail. It does have an introductory section, though, and some tips for debugging your recipes.
Here's a collection of pointers to good articles in the on-line archives of the Procmail mailing list.
Many of these are answers to recurring questions, but above all,
all of them should be worth a look simply because they are good
examples of coding style and problem solving.
(Dsiclaimer: Okay, maybe not my own :-)
The archive server doesn't always manage to find all messages in a thread, so if you get the feeling you are missing part of the picture, you may want to dive up to the "Thread Index" for the month you are looking at, and look for related messages.
SUBJECT=`formail -XSubject:`
when they would not need to call an external program
at all.
It's a simple optimization, although understanding
the syntax is a bit challenging if you haven't
worked a lot with Procmail's advanced constructs.
sed
script for sending
bounces which include the headers of the bounced message
(version 1
and
version 2)
Resent-
headers if they
are present, and try to parse out the actual addresses from each line.
This version was mostly hashed out by David Tamkin and Philip Guenther.
A summarized version is at
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1997-08/msg00073.html
:^)
:
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1998-12/msg00100.html
.signature
blocks:
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1997-05/msg00683.html
... and an older sketch by yours truly:
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1996-09/msg00028.html
There's an old archive file called "Best of the Procmail List"
which is still available from the Procmail distribution sites.
Jari's Procmail Tips page
started out as a condensed (and later, expanded :-)
version of that file.
This section includes some good examples of more-complicated mail processing systems and library files. Many of these are systems you can install and use without delving into the details of how they work or even necessarily learning how to use Procmail on its own.
Again, some of the "Rich and Famous" pages below would fit in this category, too.
Procmail makes for a very nice framework for filtering spam, although your provider should also offer other front-line defenses such as total blocking of all connections from known spam factories.
If you are merely looking for a way to put Procmail to use for blocking unwanted mail, it's probably best to simply download one of the prepackaged solutions listed here.
Check out the link to Leah Roberts' link site above. Most of the below sites are listed there, and some other useful ones as well.
formail
;
the newest version uses only sh
and is available at
http://www.claws-and-paws.com/unix/forrep.sh.html
The following links don't necessarily have a lot with Procmail to do, but may be useful to you if you are looking for more information about spam, or filtering lists you can use, etc
macabrus@aol.com
maintains various FAQs with lots of useful addresses and IP numbers
you can use.
smtpd
blocked sites.
This should be rather easy to transform into a set of
Procmail recipes.
This section has links to programs which are not necessary for operating Procmail but which can be helpful in configuring Procmail, writing advanced scripts, diagnosing problems in your setup, and other associated chores.
proclint
, a program for checking your Procmail recipe
files for various errors, is available as part of
Alan Stebbens' Procmail library
(see above).
bounce
which creates MIME bounce messages.
hashd
,
a generalized duplicate checker.
mdate
tries to canonicalize date stamps as found in mail messages. (It's
probably not 100% effective, as per
the comments in the associated discussion thread.)
filter
to Procmail converter
:-)
facility. (You need some other stuff from the same ftp site to get it
to work. The file contains the details, or read Jari's
announcement.)
See also
below.
proclog
is a tool for analyzing your Procmail logs
(somewhat similar to mailstat
which comes with Procmail)
.procmailrc
file for you
-- as well as .dotfiles for various other Unix programs --
according to your wishes. Ideal for newbies. (Still in beta.)
This listing is not nearly exhaustive, and is somewhat likely to contain broken links at any given time. A good place to look for Procmail-related utilities is Freshmeat.
As a rule, these pages contain both some sort of short introduction to Procmail and some example snippets from the authors' Procmail recipes.
.procmailrc
with some nifty header handling
(thanks to Eli for the pointer)
.rc
files
(thanks to Simeon)
.procmailrc
alone, with more to come.
And of course, there's this
magazine article about Procmail,
and the
MTA comparison.
.procmailrc
(including more umlauts as well
as PGP attachment handing), and a little bashing of elm's
pathetic filter :-)
.procmailrc
with some interesting
features; note the strong similarities with the previous one
(it's not clear to me who's borrowing from whom, but you
might want to compare them just for fun)
:-)
Here's where I try to include other relevant stuff about mail handling in general. Sendmail and spam filtering are two obvious picks of topics, but if you have other relevant links you think would fit here, please don't hesitate to mail me with them.
Spam, or unsolicited bulk e-mail, is an ubiquitous problem on today's Internet and apparently one of the foremost reasons people get interested in using Procmail. Other sections on this page contain spam-related material (notably the Spam-Fighting Tools section under Applications above).
If everything else you read here is <insert favorite language you do not understand here> to you, the following might help.
ruu.nl
)
Links are to ISI's ftp RFC archive, with the secondary pointing to Institut Pasteur's repository in France.
Here are links to other topics which might be of interest to the broad Procmail-using public.
Many of the below documents are Usenet FAQs; when available, I've included
a pointer to a primary site, but otherwise, I've used pointers to the WWW
FAQ archives at faqs.org
(USA) and ruu.nl
(the Netherlands) -- you should primarily use the one closer to you.
If you are comfortable retreiving the FAQs by ftp instead, by all means
use that and get them from your closest RTFM mirror.
(In Internet topology, Australia and the Far East are generally closer to
the US than to Europe. As for Africa and the Antarctic, I really don't know,
but I'd guess users from those continents, too, had better try the
US sites first. YMMV.)
Other than FAQs, this is mostly link collections of all sorts. If you find one that you think should be listed here, let me know.
faqs.org
or
ruu.nl
)
user+box@host
Addressing FAQ
by Eli the Bearded
(on faqs.org
;
mirror on
ruu.nl
)
(ruu.nl
mirror)
faqs.org
and
ruu.nl
)
and
http://www.sendmail.org/
(faqs.org
mirror
or
ruu.nl
)
faqs.org
or
ruu.nl
faqs.org
or
ruu.nl
)
and
6 (decoding tools -- faqs.org
or
ruu.nl
)
are of particular interest.
These FAQs appear to no longer be maintained or posted, so these links
might stop working. For the time being, as a first aid, there is a mirror at
http://www.iki.fi/era/mirrors/comp-mail-mime-faq/
-- obviously, some or all of the material will be out of date, but it's
better than nothing, and many of the links to tools etc still work.
comp.mail
newsgroups -- on
faqs.org
or
ruu.nl
newsbot
is a filtering system for Usenet news, for use with INN.
(Also available as an alt.sources
posting at
http://sunsite.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr/pub/isc/inn/contrib/newsbot
-- this is verison 1.2.1 from 1996, which still seems to be the newest.)
:-)
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