procmail question

[Linda]

Francisco Borges wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 8:50 PM, Linda <haniganwork at earthlink.net 
> <mailto:haniganwork at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>
>
>     >
>     > You're right. Knowledge of maildir! I forgot that mailboxes are
>     created
>     > on the fly, at least they are in my Alpine app.
>     >
>     >
>     I've tried all the suggestions but nothing is working. I have
>     everything
>     as simple as possible to try to get it working before I move
>     forward. I
>     suspect the problem is that maybe the .procmailrc is not really being
>     consulted. At first I thought it must be since I coduld change
>     from mbox
>     to maildir. However it seems if /var/mail/$USER is there fetchmail
>     places the messages in maildir form even without the .procmailrc
>     in place
>
>     Here is what I have for .fetchmailrc
>
>     poll isp.address protocol POP3 user username with password
>     userpassword
>     mda "procmail -d username"
>     fetchall
>
>     So is something in this the cause of the problem?
>
>
> I haven't had to work directly with procmail in years. The hints I 
> would give you are:
>
> - Consider using maildrop. While I haven't used myself, it seems like 
> a reasonable alternative to procmail's madness.
>
> - Use fetchmail's logging ("--logfile <filename> ") to discover what 
> is going on with fetchmail.
>
> If using procmail:
>
> - Do create the maildir sub-dirs yourself, the person who said these 
> are created for you seemed to be talking about *Alpine*. AFAIK 
> procmail does not create the maildir sub-dirs.
>
> - Check the permissions of the .procmailrc file, if the file is deemed 
> insecure, it won't be used.
>
> - Go to this page: http://lipas.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/proctips.html 
> <http://lipas.uwasa.fi/%7Ets/info/proctips.html> this is the best page 
> of procmail tips there is. There you'll find a shell script to test 
> your procmailrc file 
> http://lipas.uwasa.fi/~ts/info/proctips.html#testbench 
> <http://lipas.uwasa.fi/%7Ets/info/proctips.html#testbench> if you are 
> really going to use procmail, you'll need something like this.
>
> - Get procmail to log what it does as well. Timo's page should show 
> you how to do that.
>
> HTH,
> -- 
> Francisco
Thanks the links look helpful. I decided to try using $HOME/Mail/new as 
the default directory in .procmailrc and it works I guess I will quit 
fighting it and use  $HOME/Mail instead of /var/mail/$USER, it doesn't 
really matter. Now I'll play with some of the procmail recipes.  I used 
to use procmail combined with pine and fetchmail when I ran Red Hat on 
my machines so I thought I would stick to it, but if it keeps being this 
crazy I may try maildrop.
                       Thanks to everyone for their suggestions
                                        Linda