procmail
Procmail is a mail delivery agent (MDA) or mail filter, a
program to process incoming emails on a computer. It is typically
invoked from a mail transfer agent (MTA) like Sendmail;
this makes the
mail processing event-driven. The companion-tool formail allows
procmail to be used in batch-processing on mail that already is in your
mailbox.
Common operations carried out with procmail include filtering and
sorting of emails into different folders according to keywords in from,
to, subject, text of the mail, or sending autoreplies, but more
sophisticated operations are also possible.
A common practice is to let procmail call an external spam filter
program, such as SpamAssassin.
This method can allow for spam to be
filtered or even deleted.
It can be used to create mail-servers, mailing lists, sort
your incoming mail into separate folders/files (real convenient when
subscribing to one or more mailing lists or for prioritising your
mail), preprocess your mail,
start any programs upon mail arrival (e.g. to generate different chimes
on your workstation for different types of mail) or selectively forward
certain
incoming mail automatically to someone.
Features include:
- Small
- Very easy to install
- Simple to maintain and configure
- Event driven (i.e. gets invoked automagically when mail
arrives)
- Does not use any temporary files
- Uses standard egrep regular expressions
- Poses a very low impact on your system's resources
- Allows for very-easy-to-use yes-no decisions on where the
mail should go (can take the size of the mail into
consideration)
- Also allows for neural-net-type weighted scoring of mails
- Filters, delivers and forwards mail reliably
- Provides a reliable hook for any programs or shell scripts
you may wish to start upon mail arrival
- Absolutely undeliverable mail
- One of the few mailers to perform reliable mailbox locking
across NFS as well
- Supports five mailfolder standards: single file folders
(standard and nonstandard VNIX format), directory folders that contain
one file per message, the similar MH directory folders (numbered
files), and Maildir directory folders (a multi-directory format that
requires no locking)
- Native support for /var/spool/mail/b/a/bar type mailspools
- Provides a mail log file, which logs all mail
arrival, shows in summary where it came, what it was about, where it
went (what folder) and how long (in bytes) it was
- Uses this log file to display a wide range of diagnostic
and error messages (if something went wrong)
- Does not impose any limits on line lengths, mail
length
(as long as memory permits), or the use of any character (any 8-bit
character, including '\0' is allowed) in the mail
- Can be used as a local delivery agent with
comsat/biff support
- Secure system mailbox handling
- Provides for a controlled execution of programs and scripts
from the aliases file (i.e. under defined user ids)
- Allows you to painlessly shift the system mailboxes into
the users' home directories
- Can be used as a general mailfilter for whole groups of
messages (e.g. when called from within sendmail.cf rules)
- Can act as an LMTP server for reliable multiple recipient
delivery
- Works with (among others?) sendmail,
ZMailer, smail, MMDF,
mailsurr, qmail,
and Postfix
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Last Updated Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 12:54 PM EST
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