Procmail battles

Paul Michael Reilly pmr at pajato.com
Sat May 13 19:48:10 UTC 2006


Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> writes:

 > Sendmail is configured to use procmail out of the box for local 
 > delivery, but not everyone receives mail using sendmail - some use 
 > fetchmail to grab mail from their ISP mail server for instance.
 > 
 > The option in sendmail.mc for procmail delivery is:
 > 
 > FEATURE(`local_procmail')dnl
 > 
 > If you have this, local delivery should be via procmail.

I've now discovered something important.  If I configure "root" with a
.procmailrc that contains:

LOGFILE=/root/procmail.log
LOGABSTRACT=yes
VERBOSE=1

and send mail to "root" then I actually see an abstract appended to
/root/procmail.log which is consistent with the procmail man page in
that it says $HOME/.procmailrc will get processed.  I leaped,
incorrectly it would appear, to the conclusion that $HOME referred to
the mail target.  It must be referring to the User running procmail,
i.e. "root" on a stock Fedora Core system, which makes considerable
sense.  This, I believe, is the crux of my battles.

So that raises the question: how does one configure mail (sendmail or
otherwise) on a stock Fedora Core system so that ~User/.procmailrc
will be processed for all User's on the system?

I am now reaching the conclusion that dovecot, for example, takes care
of this on the corporate mail server, and that I need to do something
similar on my local machine.  

-pmr




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