Mail Management With Procmail (
Page 1 of 8 )
Tired of the sixteen terabytes of spam that confront you every
morning? Looking for a way to automatically manage and filter your
email? Say hello to procmail, automated message processing that's so
cool, it makes you want to believe in magic again.I gotta be honest with you. I love email.
I love the way the email
system works. I love the thought of all those messages whizzing around the
Internet, jumping from one host to another until they reach their destination. I
love the fact that it lets me get in touch with anyone on the planet for less
than the cost of a postcard. In short, I think it's the coolest thing since
sliced bread.
Managing it, however, really wipes the sunshine from my
day.
You see, when I first got hooked up to the Internet, my mail flow
was limited to a couple messages per week. No one in cyberspace even knew I
existed - and I liked it that way. Then I discovered mailing lists like the
Internet Oracle and the Internet Tourbus, and my mailbox started getting bigger.
Once people figured out I had email access, I started receiving messages from
employers, family and friends in far-off places. I got on the radar of the
friendly neighbourhood spammer, who though I might be interested in everything
from pet food to oil-pumping machinery and graciously added me to his
database...
I'm sure this picture is familiar to you. Before long, the
trickle turned into a torrent, and I started spending a good fifty minutes a day
wading through the previous night's email. I needed a solution, and I needed it
fast.
That's where procmail saved me.
