[Wylug-discuss] Procmail filters

[Anne Wilson]

On Wednesday 04 May 2005 20:29, ; wrote:
> Some hints that may help:
>
Thanks for the reply, Alan.

> 1) all dots in e-mail addresses should be quoted with a "\", else
> they will be interpreted as single character wildcards.
>
That's odd, because the long one that picks up newsletters is littered with 
dots, and it works!

> 2) try adding the following two lines to your .procmailrc - you
> will get some debugging info on the patterns that match
> LOGFILE=<logfile>
> VERBOSE=on
>
I already had a logfile set to verbose.  Of course it helps if you understand 
what you are reading.  For instance, a message that should have gone into the 
Family folder, showed up like this:

procmail: Notified comsat: "anne at 6283876:/var/spool/mail/anne"
From gillianholden at mydomain.org.uk  Wed May  4 19:30:09 2005
 Subject: Testing filters
  Folder: /var/spool/mail/anne	

I had added her to the family filter like this:

:0:
* ^From: .*(revsuep|suepinnington|franceswilson|mo.frances|gillianholden)
./Mail/Family

> 3) mail messages may contain both a line starting with "From "
> (containing the envelope from address) as well as one starting with
> "From: ".  All my such procmail rules start with "* ^From: "
>
OK - I'll try that.

> 4) I'd tighten up the rules a bit more to avoid positives - all my
> rules contain an "@", and many contain a "$" at the end.
>
I'm not getting any false positives at all.

> > :0:
> >
> > * ^From: .*(sasktel.net|sasknet)
>
>                      ^
> should be quoted
>
Yet it works.

> > :0:
> >
> > * ^From: .*\Josenildo
>
>              ^
> I can see no reason to quote the J

I've tried it both ways, Alan, but I'll take it off.  And the "pmbuc" one 
doesn't have the quote, but that doesn't work either.  When I first found 
some examples on the www I thought that it would all fall into place.  Later 
I found the procmailex file, which contradicted just about everything in the 
first one that I had read.  I copied some of those examples, only to find 
that they didn't work either.  You can see why I'm so confused ;-)

And just to add to the fun - last week I was away, and needed an autoresponder 
on just one of my accounts.  I carefully set it up as in procmailex, telling 
it to test for design at mydomain.org, but I'm told that it also activated on 
family messages that went to cannewilson at mydomain.org.uk.  Now I don't know 
whether that was a positive decision, or whether it was just because it had 
come to the end of the filters, but then it was supposed to be checking.  
Aarrgghhh!

Anne
-- 
Registered Linux User No.293302 (http://counter.li.org/)
Have you visited http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org yet?  Mandrake at all levels
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