procmail question

[Christopher Chan]

Linda wrote:
> 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 

If there is no trailing slash, that becomes mbox format.

> 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.

Now that I think of it...you cannot use /var/mail/$USER/ if there is a 
/var/mail/$USER mbox file in place. Then there is the question of 
whether procmail is run with the necessary uid to create /var/mail/$USER/.

procmail can created maildirs on the fly...if those are specified in the 
recipe and procmail has the permissions. So if you wanted the maildirs 
in /var/mail...maybe you best precreate them and assign them the 
necessary owners/permissions.