Mail Management With Procmail - Closing Time
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And that's about all we have time for. In this article, I introduced you to procmail, one of the more powerful mail processors on the *NIX platform, and demonstrated the process of compiling and installing it to your box. I showed you the basics of procmail recipes, explaining how they can be used to filter messages on the basis of specific characteristics, and send them to a mailbox, another email address or an external program. I also explained how procmail's recipes can be used to counter spam, to automatically organize messages from mailing lists into different mailboxes and to create email robots that reformat, reprocess and automatically respond to messages on the fly.

Of course, in all this, I barely scratched the tip of the iceberg - procmail is so versatile that its applications are almost infinite, and listing them all in a single place is well nigh impossible. The following links should provide good starting points, however:

The procmail mailing list, at http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/

The procmail FAQ, at http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/mini-faq.html

Sample recipes, at http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/proctips.html

Until next time...happy emailing!

Note: All examples in this article have been tested on Linux/i586 with procmail 3.22. Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production environment. Melonfire provides no warranties or support for the source code described in this article. YMMV!

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