The Procmail Companion

Description

This book will explain in easy to understand language the complexities of Procmail. With almost all linux distributions including procmail as a standard package Unix like systems and procmail are finding their way into more office and homes leaving more people wondering how to do 'the clever bits'.

The book will be split into 2 parts - the first part fairly introductory for new procmail users and the second more of a reference book for 'power procmail users'. The first part will have copious examples to help the reader using a mythical company as a running case study. The second part will provide solutions and tips and tricks for the more complex features of procmail.

Sample Content

Table of Contents

Foreword.


Preface.


What is Promail?

What is Procmail for?

The Basics of Email.

The History.

The Ingredients.

Obtaining and Installing Procmail.

Controlling Mail Delivery with Procmail.

Setting Up Procmail for Users.

Creating a .forward file.

Running Procmail Manually.

Running Procmail Manually to Reprocess a Mailbox.

Running Procmail Manually to Test Recipes.

Debugging Procmail Recipes.

Setting Up a Basic .procmailrc file.

Improving Efficiency.

It Is Never That Easy.

Making Copies.

Multiple Conditions in a Recipe.

Disposing of Emails.

Working with Emails by Size.

Nesting Blocks.

Summary.

Regular Expressions.

Matching Beginnings and Ends.

Matching Individual Characters.

Character Classes.

Sequence Meta-characters.

Wildcard Confusion.

Word Boundaries.

Built-in Shortcuts.

Defining Variables.

Using the Head and the Body.

Other Recipe Flags.

Adding Complexity to Conditional Lines.

Matching a Condition in the Head or Body.

Matching a Condition against a Variable.

Or Conditionals and the Else Flag.

Backreferences—What You Have Already Matched.

Scoring.

The Theory of Scoring.

Limits.

External Programs.

Capturing Output into Variables.

Extracting Data from Email and Filter Recipes.

Using External Programs in Condition Lines.

Where the External Programs are to be Found.

Announcement Mailing List.