[Wylug-help] Mail problem

[Andrew J Cole]

Anne,

>Yesterday evening my mail stopped arriving.  Coincidentally (?) there was a=
>=20
>problem with another electronic device at around the same time.  Anyway, th=
>e=20
>result appears to have been a corruption of procmailrc.  Everything seems t=
>o=20
>be working again now, but meanwhile there are a lot of messages stuck in an=
>=20
>mbox file in my home directory.  It's quite a big file, so it would take me=
> a=20
>very long time to try to separate them and forward them to myself - if in=20
>fact that's even possible.

I assume from your message that your incoming mail dropped through to your
default mailbox (mbox).

Procmail (and formail) are quite sophisticated spanners in the toolbox
and perfectly capable of being run manually (ie. after message arrival
and processing).

For example if you have messages in mbox something like (you may need
to add paths etc.)

cat mbox | formail -Ys procmail -m SOMEPATH/.procmailrc

would feed mbox into a pipe which then processed the individual messages
using the rules in SOMEPATH/.procmailrc (remwember that drop throughs
might go to mbox depending on the setup).

If you really did need to "resend" the contents of mbox then (using
sendmail in this case)

cat mbox | formail -Ys /usr/lib/sendmail -oi ADDRESS at DOMAIN

would do that message by message.

Andrew