A question about procmailrc

[Robert Nichols]

Hongwei Li wrote:
>>Hongwei Li wrote:
>>
>>>A correction:  from the beginnig of the subject line to the last searching
>>>letter should not exceed 65 chars. For example, suppose the subject line is
>>>
>>>Acccc Bnnnn ..... Hhhhhh is out of the office
>>>
>>>and the matching string is "is out of the", then if the count from A (the
>>>first letter of the subject line) to e (the last letter of the matching
>>>string) is longer than 65, say 66, then the procmailrc does not function.
>>>Then, remove any one letter before "is out...", it works.
>>>
>>>Everybody can try it to see if that is the case.
>>>
>>>Is there anyway to lift this limit?  Since Lotus Notes may add very long and
>>>strang things in the subject line, it will be very usefull to lift this
>>>limit
>>>to 80 chars long or so.
>>
>>That limit just sounds terribly unlikely.  The default LINEBUF is
>>2048, and it cannot be set smaller than 128.  I wonder if Lotus
>>Notes is actually word-wrapping the long subject line, e.g.:
>>
>>    Subject: Aaa Bbbb Ccc/Xxxx Yyy/Zzzz Dddd/Eeee is out of the
>>             office.
>>
>>If your email client reassembles the split line you might not be
>>aware of the split.  Procmail does reassemble the split line, but
>>it's possible that whitespace is being mishandled.  Procmail's
>>manpage has a noteabout a problem with the embedded newlines in
>>continued headers.  Try adding a '+' sign after each space
>>character in your matcher and see if that helps.
>>
>>--
>>Bob Nichols         Yes, "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
>>
> 
> 
> No, this time it is not Lotus Notes issue.  I sent the test email myself from
> one FC4 system using squirrelmail to another FC3 system, and manually typed
> the
> 
> Aaaaa Bbbbb Ccccc....Hhhhh Iiiii Jiiii is out of the office
> 
> in the suject line. I found if the total length is 65 or less, procmail works,
> if longer than 65, it does not function.
> 
> Hope more people test it e.g. enter the subject like:
> 
> 123456789 123456789 12...... is out of the office
> 
> to see what happen.

I ran several tests using your matcher and sample subject lines, and
procmail worked perfectly.  Then I tried a test with a word-wrapped
subject line as I described above, and the matcher did indeed fail
just as I thought it might.  The problem is that procmail replaces
the newline with a space and then concatenates the following line
just as it appears, with whatever variant of leading whitespace is
on that line.

Procmail does not recognize the notation [[:space:]] as representing
any whitespace character, so the only solution I found is to replace
each space character with "[ 	]+" (without the quotes, of course,
and the brackets actually contain just two characters, <SPACE> and
<TAB>).  That makes the matcher work correctly regardless of how the
line gets split.  Yes, it looks like a mess, but I couldn't find
anything else that works 100%.

-- 
Bob Nichols         Yes, "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.