[Wylug-discuss] Procmail filters

[Smylers]

Anne Wilson writes:

> 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!

That isn't really odd.  What Alan's saying is that in a pattern such as:

  A.King at foo.example.org

the dots are wildcards that would match any character, so the pattern as
a whole would also match:

  A.King at foodexample.org

and indeed:

  asking at foo.example.org

In practice that rarely matters: there are very few addresses which are
going to be the same as what you're trying to match but with another
character replacing a dot.  And if it does happen, you'd be getting
false positives -- whereas you're experiencing the opposite problem, so
putting backslashes before the dots wouldn't actually help here.

> > 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.

It looked like all your From: tests did already have the colon in them.
Anyway, I'm not convinced that the envelope From line is still around
for 'Procmail' to match against -- doesn't the envelope get dropped on
delivery?

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

It "works" because while "." matches any character, that of course
includes "." itself.

Unfortunately I can't offer any help with your problem Ann -- your
recipes all look plausible to me, and I couldn't spot a difference
between the ones that are working and those that aren't.

Smylers
-- 
May God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a
difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done.