Re: [SLUG] Slides from Procmail talk

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Sun Jan 19 2003 - 16:30:02 EST


On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 03:39:59PM -0500, John wrote:

> On Sun, 19 Jan 2003 14:23:17 -0500, Matt Moen wrote:
>
> -> Glad to hear it. These files wouldn't happen to be ending up
> in
> -> subdirectories with names like "cur" and "new", would they?
>
> Nope. I created a directory called $HOME/mail, and they are all
> going into "mail". They have names like msg.1mqB, msg.1nqB and
> so on, and I'm _guessing_ that the numeric part of the extension
> is the "fetch number" and then the alpha part is the message
> number for that fetch (although I have no idea why it always
> starts with mqB, nqB, oqB.... (?)

Here's what normally happens: fetchmail fetches your mail into
/var/spool/mail/john or somesuch. It is then handed off to procmail,
which shoves it into $HOME/mail. Fetchmail hands it off to procmail
because there's a line in your .fetchmailrc like:

mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T"

In your .procmailrc, you have it set to shove certain kinds of content
into certain files, depending on the recipes. It sounds like you have
some sort of recipes that are creating odd files with odd extensions on
this. If this is what you want, okay. But otherwise, I'd post your
~/.fetchmailrc and ~/.procmailrc files so we can look at what it's
doing.

Also note that some email clients will bypass fetchmail and do what they
want with the mail. In that case, they may not be handing it off to
procmail either. Which might explain the odd files you're getting.

<snip>

> Maybe you could comment on something else: What I would like to
> do next is to NOT store the messages in the file as above, but
> rather, I want to feed them to a POP server on this same
> machine. I think there is a setting I can give to procmail
> whereby it will create a spool file. I'm not sure what that is,
> but I'm assuming... I've been reading about QPopper and the
> Washington version,... just surveying the problem before I jump
> in. Any words of advice?

I have to ask why you would want to give your mail to a pop server? If
you're reading your mail on that machine, then you have all the
ingredients you need already. The only reason to implement a pop server
is if you wish to pick up mail fetched on this machine from another
machine. In that case, you might want to consider IMAP. You already
have a spool file, as I mentioned before, probably in
/var/spool/mail/john, or somewhere like that.

Paul



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