Chapter 15. Email

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To ensure that the action on this last previous matching recipe was successfully completed before

allowing a match on the current recipe, use the

a

flag instead.

  B

  Parse the body of the message and look for matching conditions.

  b

  Use the body in any resulting action, such as writing the message to a file or forwarding it.

This is the default behavior.

  c

  Generate a carbon copy of the email. This is useful with delivering recipes, since the required

action can be performed on the message and a copy of the message can continue being processed

in the

rc

files.

  D

  Makes the

egrep

comparison case sensitive. By default, the comparison process is not case 

sensitive.

  E

  Similar to the

A

flag, except that the conditions in this recipe are only compared to the message

if the immediately preceding recipe without an

E

flag did not match. This is comparable to an else

action.

Use the

e

flag instead if you only want this recipe checked if the preceding recipe matched but the

action failed.

  f

  Uses the pipe as a filter.

  H

  Parses the header of the message and looks for matching conditions. This occurs by default.

  h

  Uses the header in a resulting action. This is the default behavior.

  w

  Tells Procmail to wait for the specified filter or program to finish and report whether or not it

was successful before considering the message filtered.

If you would like to ignore "Program failure" messages when deciding whether a filter or action

succeeded, use the

W

option instead.

Additional flags can be found in the

procmailrc

man page.

15.5.2.3. Specifying a Local Lockfile

Lockfiles are very useful with Procmail to ensure that more than one process does not try to alter a

certain message at the same time. You can specify a local lockfile by placing a colon (

:

) after any

flags on a recipe's first line. This will create a local lockfile based on the destination filename plus

whatever has been set in the

LOCKEXT

global environment variable.

Alternatively, you can specify the name of the local lockfile to be used with this recipe after the colon.

15.5.2.4. Special Conditions and Actions

Particular characters used before Procmail recipe conditions and actions change the way they are

interpreted.

The following characters may be used after the

*

character at the beginning of a recipe's condition

line:

  !

  Inverts the condition, causing a match to occur only if the condition does not match the

message.

  Checks to see if the message is under the specified number of bytes.

  Checks to see if the message is over a particular number of bytes.

The following characters are used to perform special actions:

  !

  Tells Procmail to forward the message to the specified email addresses