1PROCMAILRC(5) File Formats Manual PROCMAILRC(5)
2
6 procmailrc - procmail rcfile
7
9 $HOME/.procmailrc
10
12 For a quick start, see NOTES at the end of the procmail(1) man page.
13 The rcfile can contain a mixture of environment variable assignments
15 (some of which have special meanings to procmail), and recipes. In
16 their most simple appearance, the recipes are simply one line regular
17 expressions that are searched for in the header of the arriving mail.
18 The first recipe that matches is used to determine where the mail has
19 to go (usually a file). If processing falls off the end of the rcfile,
20 procmail will deliver the mail to $DEFAULT.
21 There are two kinds of recipes: delivering and non-delivering recipes.
23 If a delivering recipe is found to match, procmail considers the mail
24 (you guessed it) delivered and will cease processing the rcfile after
25 having successfully executed the action line of the recipe. If a non-
26 delivering recipe is found to match, processing of the rcfile will con‐
27 tinue after the action line of this recipe has been executed.
28 Delivering recipes are those that cause header and/or body of the mail
30 to be: written into a file, absorbed by a program or forwarded to a
31 mailaddress.
32 Non-delivering recipes are: those that cause the output of a program or
34 filter to be captured back by procmail or those that start a nesting
35 block.
36 You can tell procmail to treat a delivering recipe as if it were a non-
38 delivering recipe by specifying the `c' flag on such a recipe. This
39 will make procmail generate a carbon copy of the mail by delivering it
40 to this recipe, yet continue processing the rcfile.
41 By using any number of recipes you can presort your mail extremely
43 straightforward into several mailfolders. Bear in mind though that the
44 mail can arrive concurrently in these mailfolders (if several procmail
45 programs happen to run at the same time, not unlikely if a lot of mail
46 arrives). To make sure this does not result in a mess, proper use of
47 lockfiles is highly recommended.
48 The environment variable assignments and recipes can be freely inter‐
50 mixed in the rcfile. If any environment variable has a special meaning
51 to procmail, it will be used appropriately the moment it is parsed
52 (i.e., you can change the current directory whenever you want by speci‐
53 fying a new MAILDIR, switch lockfiles by specifying a new LOCKFILE,
54 change the umask at any time, etc., the possibilities are endless :-).
55 The assignments and substitutions of these environment variables are
57 handled exactly like in sh(1) (that includes all possible quotes and
58 escapes), with the added bonus that blanks around the '=' sign are ig‐
59 nored and that, if an environment variable appears without a trailing
60 '=', it will be removed from the environment. Any program in back‐
61 quotes started by procmail will have the entire mail at its stdin.
62 Comments
64 A word beginning with # and all the following characters up to a NEW‐
65 LINE are ignored. This does not apply to condition lines, which cannot
66 be commented.
67 Recipes
69 A line starting with ':' marks the beginning of a recipe. It has the
70 following format:
71 :0 [flags] [ : [locallockfile] ]
73 <zero or more conditions (one per line)>
74 <exactly one action line>
75 Conditions start with a leading `*', everything after that character is
77 passed on to the internal egrep literally, except for leading and
78 trailing whitespace. These regular expressions are completely compati‐
79 ble to the normal egrep(1) extended regular expressions. See also Ex‐
80 tended regular expressions.
81 Conditions are anded; if there are no conditions the result will be
83 true by default.
84 Flags can be any of the following:
86 H Egrep the header (default).
88 B Egrep the body.
90 D Tell the internal egrep to distinguish between upper and lower
92 case (contrary to the default which is to ignore case).
93 A This recipe will not be executed unless the conditions on the last
95 preceding recipe (on the current block-nesting level) without the
96 `A' or `a' flag matched as well. This allows you to chain actions
97 that depend on a common condition.
98 a Has the same meaning as the `A' flag, with the additional condi‐
100 tion that the immediately preceding recipe must have been success‐
101 fully completed before this recipe is executed.
102 E This recipe only executes if the immediately preceding recipe was
104 not executed. Execution of this recipe also disables any immedi‐
105 ately following recipes with the 'E' flag. This allows you to
106 specify `else if' actions.
107 e This recipe only executes if the immediately preceding recipe
109 failed (i.e., the action line was attempted, but resulted in an
110 error).
111 h Feed the header to the pipe, file or mail destination (default).
113 b Feed the body to the pipe, file or mail destination (default).
115 f Consider the pipe as a filter.
117 c Generate a carbon copy of this mail. This only makes sense on de‐
119 livering recipes. The only non-delivering recipe this flag has an
120 effect on is on a nesting block, in order to generate a carbon
121 copy this will clone the running procmail process (lockfiles will
122 not be inherited), whereby the clone will proceed as usual and the
123 parent will jump across the block.
124 w Wait for the filter or program to finish and check its exitcode
126 (normally ignored); if the filter is unsuccessful, then the text
127 will not have been filtered.
128 W Has the same meaning as the `w' flag, but will suppress any `Pro‐
130 gram failure' message.
131 i Ignore any write errors on this recipe (i.e., usually due to an
133 early closed pipe).
134 r Raw mode, do not try to ensure the mail ends with an empty line,
136 write it out as is.
137 There are some special conditions you can use that are not straight
139 regular expressions. To select them, the condition must start with:
140 ! Invert the condition.
142 $ Evaluate the remainder of this condition according to sh(1) sub‐
144 stitution rules inside double quotes, skip leading whitespace,
145 then reparse it.
146 ? Use the exitcode of the specified program.
148 < Check if the total length of the mail is shorter than the speci‐
150 fied (in decimal) number of bytes.
151 > Analogous to '<'.
153 variablename ??
155 Match the remainder of this condition against the value of this
156 environment variable (which cannot be a pseudo variable). A spe‐
157 cial case is if variablename is equal to `B', `H', `HB' or `BH';
158 this merely overrides the default header/body search area defined
159 by the initial flags on this recipe.
160 \ To quote any of the above at the start of the line.
162 Local lockfile
164 If you put a second (trailing) ':' on the first recipe line, then proc‐
165 mail will use a locallockfile (for this recipe only). You can option‐
166 ally specify the locallockfile to use; if you don't however, procmail
167 will use the destination filename (or the filename following the first
168 '>>') and will append $LOCKEXT to it.
169 Recipe action line
171 The action line can start with the following characters:
172 ! Forwards to all the specified mail addresses.
174 | Starts the specified program, possibly in $SHELL if any of the
176 characters $SHELLMETAS are spotted. You can optionally prepend
177 this pipe symbol with variable=, which will cause stdout of the
178 program to be captured in the environment variable (procmail
179 will not terminate processing the rcfile at this point). If you
180 specify just this pipe symbol, without any program, then proc‐
181 mail will pipe the mail to stdout.
182 { Followed by at least one space, tab or newline will mark the
184 start of a nesting block. Everything up till the next closing
185 brace will depend on the conditions specified for this recipe.
186 Unlimited nesting is permitted. The closing brace exists merely
187 to delimit the block, it will not cause procmail to terminate in
188 any way. If the end of a block is reached processing will con‐
189 tinue as usual after the block. On a nesting block, the flags
190 `H' and `B' only affect the conditions leading up to the block,
191 the flags `h' and `b' have no effect whatsoever.
192 Anything else will be taken as a mailbox name (either a filename or a
194 directory, absolute or relative to the current directory (see
195 MAILDIR)). If it is a (possibly yet nonexistent) filename, the mail
196 will be appended to it.
197 If it is a directory, the mail will be delivered to a newly created,
199 guaranteed to be unique file named $MSGPREFIX* in the specified direc‐
200 tory. If the mailbox name ends in "/.", then this directory is pre‐
201 sumed to be an MH folder; i.e., procmail will use the next number it
202 finds available. If the mailbox name ends in "/", then this directory
203 is presumed to be a maildir folder; i.e., procmail will deliver the
204 message to a file in a subdirectory named "tmp" and rename it to be in‐
205 side a subdirectory named "new". If the mailbox is specified to be an
206 MH folder or maildir folder, procmail will create the necessary direc‐
207 tories if they don't exist, rather than treat the mailbox as a non-ex‐
208 istent filename. When procmail is delivering to directories, you can
209 specify multiple directories to deliver to (procmail will do so utilis‐
210 ing hardlinks).
211 Environment variable defaults
213 LOGNAME, HOME and USER_SHELL
214 Your (the recipient's) defaults
215 SHELL /bin/sh
217 PATH $HOME/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/lo‐
219 cal/bin :/usr/X11R6/bin (Except during the pro‐
220 cessing of an /etc/procmailrc file, when it will
221 be set to `/usr/local/bin:/bin'.)
222 SHELLMETAS &|<>~;?*[
224 SHELLFLAGS -c
226 ORGMAIL /var/spool/mail/$LOGNAME
228 (Unless -m has been specified, in which case it
229 is unset)
230 MAILDIR $HOME
232 (Unless the name of the first successfully opened
233 rcfile starts with `./' or if -m has been speci‐
234 fied, in which case it defaults to `.')
235 DEFAULT $ORGMAIL
237 MSGPREFIX msg.
239 SENDMAIL /usr/sbin/sendmail
241 SENDMAILFLAGS -oi
243 HOST The current hostname
245 COMSAT no
247 (If an rcfile is specified on the command line)
248 PROCMAIL_VERSION 3.24
250 LOCKEXT .lock
252 Other cleared or preset environment variables are IFS, ENV and PWD.
254 For security reasons, upon startup procmail will wipe out all environ‐
256 ment variables that are suspected of modifying the behavior of the run‐
257 time linker.
258 Environment
260 Before you get lost in the multitude of environment variables, keep in
261 mind that all of them have reasonable defaults.
262 MAILDIR Current directory while procmail is executing (that means
264 that all paths are relative to $MAILDIR).
265 DEFAULT Default mailbox file (if not told otherwise, procmail will
267 dump mail in this mailbox). Procmail will automatically
268 use $DEFAULT$LOCKEXT as lockfile prior to writing to this
269 mailbox. You do not need to set this variable, since it
270 already points to the standard system mailbox.
271 LOGFILE This file will also contain any error or diagnostic mes‐
273 sages from procmail (normally none :-) or any other pro‐
274 grams started by procmail. If this file is not specified,
275 any diagnostics or error messages will be mailed back to
276 the sender. See also LOGABSTRACT.
277 VERBOSE You can turn on extended diagnostics by setting this vari‐
279 able to `yes' or `on', to turn it off again set it to `no'
280 or `off'.
281 LOGABSTRACT Just before procmail exits it logs an abstract of the de‐
283 livered message in $LOGFILE showing the `From ' and `Sub‐
284 ject:' fields of the header, what folder it finally went to
285 and how long (in bytes) the message was. By setting this
286 variable to `no', generation of this abstract is sup‐
287 pressed. If you set it to `all', procmail will log an ab‐
288 stract for every successful delivering recipe it processes.
289 LOG Anything assigned to this variable will be appended to
291 $LOGFILE.
292 ORGMAIL Usually the system mailbox (ORiGinal MAILbox). If, for
294 some obscure reason (like `filesystem full') the mail could
295 not be delivered, then this mailbox will be the last re‐
296 sort. If procmail fails to save the mail in here (deep,
297 deep trouble :-), then the mail will bounce back to the
298 sender.
299 LOCKFILE Global semaphore file. If this file already exists, proc‐
301 mail will wait until it has gone before proceeding, and
302 will create it itself (cleaning it up when ready, of
303 course). If more than one lockfile are specified, then the
304 previous one will be removed before trying to create the
305 new one. The use of a global lockfile is discouraged,
306 whenever possible use locallockfiles (on a per recipe ba‐
307 sis) instead.
308 LOCKEXT Default extension that is appended to a destination file to
310 determine what local lockfile to use (only if turned on, on
311 a per-recipe basis).
312 LOCKSLEEP Number of seconds procmail will sleep before retrying on a
314 lockfile (if it already existed); if not specified, it de‐
315 faults to 8 seconds.
316 LOCKTIMEOUT Number of seconds that have to have passed since a lockfile
318 was last modified/created before procmail decides that this
319 must be an erroneously leftover lockfile that can be re‐
320 moved by force now. If zero, then no timeout will be used
321 and procmail will wait forever until the lockfile is re‐
322 moved; if not specified, it defaults to 1024 seconds. This
323 variable is useful to prevent indefinite hangups of send‐
324 mail/procmail. Procmail is immune to clock skew across ma‐
325 chines.
326 TIMEOUT Number of seconds that have to have passed before procmail
328 decides that some child it started must be hanging. The
329 offending program will receive a TERMINATE signal from
330 procmail, and processing of the rcfile will continue. If
331 zero, then no timeout will be used and procmail will wait
332 forever until the child has terminated; if not specified,
333 it defaults to 960 seconds.
334 MSGPREFIX Filename prefix that is used when delivering to a directory
336 (not used when delivering to a maildir or an MH directory).
337 HOST If this is not the hostname of the machine, processing of
339 the current rcfile will immediately cease. If other rcfiles
340 were specified on the command line, processing will con‐
341 tinue with the next one. If all rcfiles are exhausted, the
342 program will terminate, but will not generate an error
343 (i.e., to the mailer it will seem that the mail has been
344 delivered).
345 UMASK The name says it all (if it doesn't, then forget about this
347 one :-). Anything assigned to UMASK is taken as an octal
348 number. If not specified, the umask defaults to 077. If
349 the umask permits o+x, all the mailboxes procmail delivers
350 to directly will receive an o+x mode change. This can be
351 used to check if new mail arrived.
352 SHELLMETAS If any of the characters in SHELLMETAS appears in the line
354 specifying a filter or program, the line will be fed to
355 $SHELL instead of being executed directly.
356 SHELLFLAGS Any invocation of $SHELL will be like:
358 "$SHELL" "$SHELLFLAGS" "$*";
359 SENDMAIL If you're not using the forwarding facility don't worry
361 about this one. It specifies the program being called to
362 forward any mail.
363 It gets invoked as: "$SENDMAIL" $SENDMAILFLAGS "$@";
364 NORESRETRY Number of retries that are to be made if any `process table
366 full', `file table full', `out of memory' or `out of swap
367 space' error should occur. If this number is negative,
368 then procmail will retry indefinitely; if not specified, it
369 defaults to 4 times. The retries occur with a $SUSPEND
370 second interval. The idea behind this is that if, e.g.,
371 the swap space has been exhausted or the process table is
372 full, usually several other programs will either detect
373 this as well and abort or crash 8-), thereby freeing valu‐
374 able resources for procmail.
375 SUSPEND Number of seconds that procmail will pause if it has to
377 wait for something that is currently unavailable (memory,
378 fork, etc.); if not specified, it will default to 16 sec‐
379 onds. See also: LOCKSLEEP.
380 LINEBUF Length of the internal line buffers, cannot be set smaller
382 than 128. All lines read from the rcfile should not exceed
383 $LINEBUF characters before and after expansion. If not
384 specified, it defaults to 2048. This limit, of course,
385 does not apply to the mail itself, which can have arbitrary
386 line lengths, or could be a binary file for that matter.
387 See also PROCMAIL_OVERFLOW.
388 DELIVERED If set to `yes' procmail will pretend (to the mail agent)
390 the mail has been delivered. If mail cannot be delivered
391 after having met this assignment (set to `yes'), the mail
392 will be lost (i.e., it will not bounce).
393 TRAP When procmail terminates of its own accord and not because
395 it received a signal, it will execute the contents of this
396 variable. A copy of the mail can be read from stdin. Any
397 output produced by this command will be appended to $LOG‐
398 FILE. Possible uses for TRAP are: removal of temporary
399 files, logging customised abstracts, etc. See also EXIT‐
400 CODE and LOGABSTRACT.
401 EXITCODE By default, procmail returns an exitcode of zero (success)
403 if it successfully delivered the message or if the HOST
404 variable was misset and there were no more rcfiles on the
405 command line; otherwise it returns failure. Before doing
406 so, procmail examines the value of this variable. If it is
407 set to a positive numeric value, procmail will instead use
408 that value as its exitcode. If this variable is set but
409 empty and TRAP is set, procmail will set the exitcode to
410 whatever the TRAP program returns. If this variable is not
411 set, procmail will set it shortly before calling up the
412 TRAP program.
413 LASTFOLDER This variable is assigned to by procmail whenever it is de‐
415 livering to a folder or program. It always contains the
416 name of the last file (or program) procmail delivered to.
417 If the last delivery was to several directory folders to‐
418 gether then $LASTFOLDER will contain the hardlinked file‐
419 names as a space separated list.
420 MATCH This variable is assigned to by procmail whenever it is
422 told to extract text from a matching regular expression.
423 It will contain all text matching the regular expression
424 past the `\/' token.
425 SHIFT Assigning a positive value to this variable has the same
427 effect as the `shift' command in sh(1). This command is
428 most useful to extract extra arguments passed to procmail
429 when acting as a generic mailfilter.
430 INCLUDERC Names an rcfile (relative to the current directory) which
432 will be included here as if it were part of the current rc‐
433 file. Nesting is permitted and only limited by systems re‐
434 sources (memory and file descriptors). As no checking is
435 done on the permissions or ownership of the rcfile, users
436 of INCLUDERC should make sure that only trusted users have
437 write access to the included rcfile or the directory it is
438 in. Command line assignments to INCLUDERC have no effect.
439 SWITCHRC Names an rcfile (relative to the current directory) to
441 which processing will be switched. If the named rcfile
442 doesn't exist or is not a normal file or /dev/null then an
443 error will be logged and processing will continue in the
444 current rcfile. Otherwise, processing of the current rc‐
445 file will be aborted and the named rcfile started. Unset‐
446 ting SWITCHRC aborts processing of the current rcfile as if
447 it had ended at the assignment. As with INCLUDERC, no
448 checking is done on the permissions or ownership of the rc‐
449 file and command line assignments have no effect.
450 PROCMAIL_VERSION
452 The version number of the running procmail binary.
453 PROCMAIL_OVERFLOW
455 This variable will be set to a non-empty value if procmail
456 detects a buffer overflow. See the BUGS section below for
457 other details of operation when overflow occurs.
458 COMSAT Comsat(8)/biff(1) notification is on by default, it can be
460 turned off by setting this variable to `no'. Alternatively
461 the biff-service can be customised by setting it to either
462 `service@', `@hostname', or `service@hostname'. When not
463 specified it defaults to biff@localhost.
464 DROPPRIVS If set to `yes' procmail will drop all privileges it might
466 have had (suid or sgid). This is only useful if you want
467 to guarantee that the bottom half of the /etc/procmailrc
468 file is executed on behalf of the recipient.
469 Extended regular expressions
471 The following tokens are known to both the procmail internal egrep and
472 the standard egrep(1) (beware that some egrep implementations include
473 other non-standard extensions; in particular, the repetition operator {
474 is not supported by procmail's egrep):
475 ^ Start of a line.
477 $ End of a line.
479 . Any character except a newline.
481 a* Any sequence of zero or more a's.
483 a+ Any sequence of one or more a's.
485 a? Either zero or one a.
487 [^-a-d] Any character which is not either a dash, a, b, c, d or new‐
489 line.
490 de|abc Either the sequence `de' or `abc'.
492 (abc)* Zero or more times the sequence `abc'.
494 \. Matches a single dot; use \ to quote any of the magic charac‐
496 ters to get rid of their special meaning. See also $\ vari‐
497 able substitution.
498 These were only samples, of course, any more complex combination is
500 valid as well.
501 The following token meanings are special procmail extensions:
503 ^ or $ Match a newline (for multiline matches).
505 ^^ Anchor the expression at the very start of the search area,
507 or if encountered at the end of the expression, anchor it at
508 the very end of the search area.
509 \< or \> Match the character before or after a word. They are merely
511 a shorthand for `[^a-zA-Z0-9_]', but can also match newlines.
512 Since they match actual characters, they are only suitable to
513 delimit words, not to delimit inter-word space.
514 \/ Splits the expression in two parts. Everything matching the
516 right part will be assigned to the MATCH environment vari‐
517 able.
518
520 Look in the procmailex(5) man page.
521
523 Continued lines in an action line that specifies a program always have
524 to end in a backslash, even if the underlying shell would not need or
525 want the backslash to indicate continuation. This is due to the two
526 pass parsing process needed (first procmail, then the shell (or not,
527 depending on SHELLMETAS)).
528 Don't put comments on the regular expression condition lines in a
530 recipe, these lines are fed to the internal egrep literally (except for
531 continuation backslashes at the end of a line).
532 Leading whitespace on continued regular expression condition lines is
534 usually ignored (so that they can be indented), but not on continued
535 condition lines that are evaluated according to the sh(1) substitution
536 rules inside double quotes.
537 Watch out for deadlocks when doing unhealthy things like forwarding
539 mail to your own account. Deadlocks can be broken by proper use of
540 LOCKTIMEOUT.
541 Any default values that procmail has for some environment variables
543 will always override the ones that were already defined. If you really
544 want to override the defaults, you either have to put them in the rc‐
545 file or on the command line as arguments.
546 The /etc/procmailrc file cannot change the PATH setting seen by user
548 rcfiles as the value is reset when procmail finishes the /etc/proc‐
549 mailrc file. While future enhancements are expected in this area, re‐
550 compiling procmail with the desired value is currently the only correct
551 solution.
552 Environment variables set inside the shell-interpreted-`|' action part
554 of a recipe will not retain their value after the recipe has finished
555 since they are set in a subshell of procmail. To make sure the value
556 of an environment variable is retained you have to put the assignment
557 to the variable before the leading `|' of a recipe, so that it can cap‐
558 ture stdout of the program.
559 If you specify only a `h' or a `b' flag on a delivering recipe, and the
561 recipe matches, then, unless the `c' flag is present as well, the body
562 respectively the header of the mail will be silently lost.
563
565 procmail(1), procmailsc(5), procmailex(5), sh(1), csh(1), mail(1),
566 mailx(1), uucp(1), aliases(5), sendmail(8), egrep(1), regexp(5),
567 grep(1), biff(1), comsat(8), lockfile(1), formail(1)
568
570 The only substitutions of environment variables that can be handled by
571 procmail itself are of the type $name, ${name}, ${name:-text},
572 ${name:+text}, ${name-text}, ${name+text}, $\name, $#, $n, $$, $?, $_,
573 $- and $=; whereby $\name will be substituted by the all-magic-regular-
574 expression-characters-disarmed equivalent of $name, $_ by the name of
575 the current rcfile, $- by $LASTFOLDER and $= will contain the score of
576 the last recipe. Furthermore, the result of $\name substitution will
577 never be split on whitespace. When the -a or -m options are used, $#
578 will expand to the number of arguments so specified and "$@" (the
579 quotes are required) will expand to the specified arguments. However,
580 "$@" will only be expanded when used in the argument list to a program,
581 and then only one such occurrence will be expanded.
582 Unquoted variable expansions performed by procmail are always split on
584 space, tab, and newline characters; the IFS variable is not used inter‐
585 nally.
586 Procmail does not support the expansion of `~'.
588 A line buffer of length $LINEBUF is used when processing the rcfile,
590 any expansions that don't fit within this limit will be truncated and
591 PROCMAIL_OVERFLOW will be set. If the overflowing line is a condition
592 or an action line, then it will be considered failed and procmail will
593 continue processing. If it is a variable assignment or recipe start
594 line then procmail will abort the entire rcfile.
595 If the global lockfile has a relative path, and the current directory
597 is not the same as when the global lockfile was created, then the glob‐
598 al lockfile will not be removed if procmail exits at that point (reme‐
599 dy: use absolute paths to specify global lockfiles).
600 If an rcfile has a relative path and when the rcfile is first opened
602 MAILDIR contains a relative path, and if at one point procmail is in‐
603 structed to clone itself and the current directory has changed since
604 the rcfile was opened, then procmail will not be able to clone itself
605 (remedy: use an absolute path to reference the rcfile or make sure
606 MAILDIR contains an absolute path as the rcfile is opened).
607 A locallockfile on the recipe that marks the start of a non-forking
609 nested block does not work as expected.
610 When capturing stdout from a recipe into an environment variable, ex‐
612 actly one trailing newline will be stripped.
613 Some non-optimal and non-obvious regexps set MATCH to an incorrect val‐
615 ue. The regexp can be made to work by removing one or more unneeded
616 '*', '+', or '?' operators on the left-hand side of the \/ token.
617
619 If the regular expression contains `^TO_' it will be substituted by
620 `(^((Original-)?(Resent-)?(To|Cc|Bcc)|(X-Envelope
621 |Apparently(-Resent)?)-To):(.*[^-a-zA-Z0-9_.])?)', which should catch
622 all destination specifications containing a specific address.
623 If the regular expression contains `^TO' it will be substituted by
625 `(^((Original-)?(Resent-)?(To|Cc|Bcc)|(X-Envelope
626 |Apparently(-Resent)?)-To):(.*[^a-zA-Z])?)', which should catch all
627 destination specifications containing a specific word.
628 If the regular expression contains `^FROM_DAEMON' it will be substitut‐
630 ed by `(^(Mailing-List:|Precedence:.*(junk|bulk|list)|To: Multiple
631 recipients of |(((Resent-)?(From|Sender)|X-Envelope-From):|>?From
632 )([^>]*[^(.%@a-z0-9])?(Post(ma?(st(e?r)?|n)|office)|(send)?Mail(er)?
633 |daemon|m(mdf|ajordomo)|n?uucp|LIST(SERV|proc)|NETSERV|o(wner|ps)
634 |r(e(quest|sponse)|oot)|b(ounce|bs\.smtp)|echo|mirror|s(erv(ices?|er)
635 |mtp(error)?|ystem)|A(dmin(istrator)?|MMGR|utoanswer))(([^).!:a-
636 z0-9][-_a-z0-9]*)?[%@>\t ][^<)]*(\(.*\).*)?)?$([^>]|$)))', which should
637 catch mails coming from most daemons (how's that for a regular
638 expression :-).
639 If the regular expression contains `^FROM_MAILER' it will be substitut‐
641 ed by `(^(((Resent-)?(From|Sender)|X-Envelope-From):|>?From
642 )([^>]*[^(.%@a-z0-9])?(Post(ma(st(er)?|n)|office)|(send)?Mail(er)?
643 |daemon|mmdf|n?uucp|ops|r(esponse|oot)|(bbs\.)?smtp(error)?|s(erv(ices?
644 |er)|ystem)|A(dmin(istrator)?|MMGR))(([^).!:a-z0-9][-_a-z0-9]*)?[%@>\t
645 ][^<)]*(\(.*\).*)?)?$([^>]|$))' (a stripped down version of
646 `^FROM_DAEMON'), which should catch mails coming from most mailer-
647 daemons.
648 When assigning boolean values to variables like VERBOSE, DELIVERED or
650 COMSAT, procmail accepts as true every string starting with: a non-zero
651 value, `on', `y', `t' or `e'. False is every string starting with: a
652 zero value, `off', `n', `f' or `d'.
653 If the action line of a recipe specifies a program, a sole backslash-
655 newline pair in it on an otherwise empty line will be converted into a
656 newline.
657 The regular expression engine built into procmail does not support
659 named character classes.
660
662 Since unquoted leading whitespace is generally ignored in the rcfile
663 you can indent everything to taste.
664 The leading `|' on the action line to specify a program or filter is
666 stripped before checking for $SHELLMETAS.
667 Files included with the INCLUDERC directive containing only environment
669 variable assignments can be shared with sh.
670 The current behavior of assignments on the command line to INCLUDERC
672 and SWITCHRC is not guaranteed, has been changed once already, and may
673 be changed again or removed in future releases.
674 For really complicated processing you can even consider calling proc‐
676 mail recursively.
677 In the old days, the `:0' that marks the beginning of a recipe, had to
679 be changed to `:n', whereby `n' denotes the number of conditions that
680 follow.
681
683 Stephen R. van den Berg
684 <srb@cuci.nl>
685 BuGless PROCMAILRC(5)