|
PROCMAILRC
PROCMAILRC(5)
- NAME
- procmailrc - procmail rcfile
- SYNOPSIS
- $HOME/.procmailrc
- DESCRIPTION
- For a quick start, see NOTES at the end of the procmail(1)
man page.
The rcfile can contain a mixture of environment variable assignments
(some of which have special meanings to procmail), and recipes. In their
most simple appearance, the recipes are simply one line regular
expressions that are searched for in the header of the arriving mail.
The first recipe that matches is used to determine where the mail has to
go (usually a file). If processing falls off the end of the rcfile,
procmail will deliver the mail to $DEFAULT.
There are two kinds of recipes: delivering and non-delivering
recipes. If a delivering recipe is found to match, procmail
considers the mail (you guessed it) delivered and will cease
processing the rcfile after having successfully executed the action
line of the recipe. If a non-delivering recipe is found to match,
processing of the rcfile will continue after the action line of
this recipe has been executed.
Delivering recipes are those that cause header and/or body of the
mail to be: written into a file, absorbed by a program or forwarded to a
mailaddress.
Non-delivering recipes are: those that cause the output of a program
or filter to be captured back by procmail or those that start a nesting
block.
You can tell procmail to treat a delivering recipe as if it
were a non-delivering recipe by specifying the `c' flag on such a
recipe. This will make procmail generate a carbon copy of the
mail by delivering it to this recipe, yet continue processing the
rcfile.
By using any number of recipes you can presort your mail extremely
straightforward into several mailfolders. Bear in mind though that the
mail can arrive concurrently in these mailfolders (if several procmail
programs happen to run at the same time, not unlikely if a lot of mail
arrives). To make sure this does not result in a mess, proper use of
lockfiles is highly recommended.
The environment variable assignments and recipes can be
freely intermixed in the rcfile. If any environment variable has a
special meaning to procmail, it will be used appropriately the moment it
is parsed (i.e. you can change the current directory whenever you want
by specifying a new MAILDIR, switch lockfiles by specifying a new
LOCKFILE, change the umask at any time, etc., the possibiliies
are endless :-).
The assignments and substitutions of these environment variables are
handled exactly like in sh(1) (that includes all possible quotes
and escapes), with the added bonus that blanks around the '=' sign are
ignored and that, if an environment variable appears without a trailing
'=', it will be removed from the environment. Any program in backquotes
started by procmail will have the entire mail at its stdin.
Comments A word beginning with # and all the following
characters up to a NEWLINE are ignored. This does not apply to condition
lines, which cannot be commented.
Recipes A line starting with ':' marks the beginning of a
recipe. It has the following format: :0 [flags] [ : [locallockfile] ]
<zero or more conditions (one per line)>
<exactly one action line>
Conditions start with a leading `*', everything after that character
is passed on to the internal egrep literally, except for leading
and trailing whitespace. These regular expressions are completely
compatible to the normal egrep(1) extended regular expressions.
See also Extended regular expressions.
Conditions are anded; if there are no conditions the result will be
true by default.
Flags can be any of the following:
H |
Egrep the header (default).
|
B |
Egrep the body.
|
D |
Tell the internal egrep to distinguish between
upper and lower case (contrary to the default which is to ignore
case). |
A |
This recipe will not be executed unless the
conditions on the last preceding recipe (on the current
block-nesting level) without the `A' or `a' flag matched as well.
This allows you to chain actions that depend on a common
condition. |
a |
Has the same meaning as the `A' flag, with the
additional condition that the immediately preceding recipe must
have been successfully completed before this recipe is
executed. |
E |
This recipe only executes if the immediately
preceding recipe was not executed. Execution of this recipe also
disables any immediately following recipes with the 'E' flag. This
allows you to specify `else if' actions. |
e |
This recipe only executes if the immediately
preceding recipe failed (i.e. the action line was
attempted, but resulted in an error). |
h |
Feed the header to the pipe, file or mail
destination (default). |
b |
Feed the body to the pipe, file or mail destination
(default). |
f |
Consider the pipe as a filter. |
c |
Generate a carbon copy of this mail. This
only makes sense on delivering recipes. The only
non-delivering recipe this flag has an effect on is on a nesting
block, in order to generate a carbon copy this will clone
the running procmail process (lockfiles will not be inherited),
whereby the clone will proceed as usual and the parent will jump
across the block. |
w |
Wait for the filter or program to finish and check
its exitcode (normally ignored); if the filter is unsuccessful,
then the text will not have been filtered. |
W |
Has the same meaning as the `w' flag, but will
suppress any `Program failure' message. |
i |
Ignore any write errors on this recipe (i.e.
usually due to an early closed pipe). |
r |
Raw mode, do not try to ensure the mail ends with
an empty line, write it out as is. |
There are some special conditions you can use that are not straight
regular expressions. To select them, the condition must start with:
! |
Invert the condition. |
$ |
Evaluate the remainder of this condition according
to sh(1) substitution rules inside double quotes, skip
leading whitespace, then reparse it. |
? |
Use the exitcode of the specified program. |
< |
Check if the total length of the mail is shorter
than the specified (in decimal) number of bytes. |
> |
Analogous to '<'. |
variablename ?? |
Match the remainder of this condition against the
value of this environment variable (which cannot be a pseudo
variable). A special case is if variablename is equal to `B', `H',
`HB' or `BH'; this merely overrides the default header/body search
area defined by the initial flags on this recipe. |
\ |
To quote any of the above at the start of the line.
|
Local lockfile If you put a second (trailing) ':' on the
first recipe line, then procmail will use a locallockfile (for
this recipe only). You can optionally specify the locallockfile to use;
if you don't however, procmail will use the destination filename (or the
filename following the first '>>') and will append $LOCKEXT to it.
Recipe action line The action line can start with the
following characters:
! |
Forwards to all the specified mail addresses.
|
| |
Starts the specified program, possibly in $SHELL if
any of the characters $SHELLMETAS are spotted. You can optionally
prepend this pipe symbol with variable=, which will cause
stdout of the program to be captured in the environment
variable (procmail will not terminate processing the
rcfile at this point). If you specify just this pipe symbol,
without any program, then procmail will pipe the mail to stdout.
|
{ |
Followed by at least one space, tab or newline will
mark the start of a nesting block. Everything up till the next
closing brace will depend on the conditions specified for this
recipe. Unlimited nesting is permitted. The closing brace exists
merely to delimit the block, it will not cause procmail to
terminate in any way. If the end of a block is reached processing
will continue as usual after the block. On a nesting block, the
flags `H' and `B' only affect the conditions leading up to the
block, the flags `h' and `b' have no effect whatsoever.
|
Anything else will be taken as a mailbox name (either a filename or a
directory, absolute or relative to the current directory (see MAILDIR)).
If it is a (possibly yet nonexistent) filename, the mail will be
appended to it.
If it is a directory, the mail will be delivered to a newly created,
guaranteed to be unique file named $MSGPREFIX* in the specified
directory. If the directory name ends in "/.", then this directory is
presumed to be an MH folder; i.e. procmail will use the next number it
finds available. When procmail is delivering to directories, you can
specify multiple directories to deliver to (procmail will do so
utilising hardlinks).
Environment variable defaults
LOGNAME, HOME and SHELL |
Your (the recipient's) defaults |
SHELLMETAS |
&|<>~;?*[ |
SHELLFLAGS |
-c |
ORGMAIL |
/usr/mail/$LOGNAME (Unless -m has been
specified, in which case it is unset) |
MAILDIR |
$HOME/ (Unless the name of the first
successfully opened rcfile starts with `./' or if -m has
been specified, in which case it defaults to `.') |
DEFAULT |
$ORGMAIL |
MSGPREFIX |
msg. |
SENDMAIL |
/bin/sendmail |
SENDMAILFLAGS |
-oi |
HOST |
The current hostname |
COMSAT |
no (If an rcfile is specified on the command
line) |
LOCKEXT |
.lock |
Other cleared or preset environment variables are IFS, ENV, PWD and
PATH=$HOME/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin :/usr/X11/bin.
Environment Before you get lost in the multitude of
environment variables, keep in mind that all of them have reasonable
defaults.
MAILDIR |
Current directory while procmail is executing (that
means that all paths are relative to $MAILDIR). |
DEFAULT |
Default mailbox file (if not told otherwise,
procmail will dump mail in this mailbox). Procmail will
automatically use $DEFAULT$LOCK- EXT as lockfile prior to writing
to this mailbox. You do not need to set this variable, since it
already points to the standard system mailbox. |
LOGFILE |
This file will also contain any error or diagnostic
messages from procmail (normally none :-) or any other programs
started by procmail. If this file is not specified, any
diagnostics or error messages will be mailed back to the sender.
See also LOGABSTRACT. |
VERBOSE |
You can turn on extended diagnostics by
setting this variable to `yes' or `on', to turn it off again set
it to `no' or `off'. |
LOGABSTRACT |
Just before procmail exits it logs an abstract of
the delivered message in $LOGFILE showing the `From ' and
`Subject:' fields of the header, what folder it finally went to
and how long (in bytes) the message was. By setting this variable
to `no', generation of this abstract is suppressed. If you set it
to `all', procmail will log an abstract for every successful
delivering recipe it processes. |
LOG |
Anything assigned to this variable will be appended
to $LOGFILE. |
ORGMAIL |
Usually the system mailbox (ORiGinal
MAILbox). If, for some obscure reason (like `filesystem
full') the mail could not be delivered, then this mailbox will
be the last resort. If procmail fails to save the mail in here
(deep, deep trouble :-), then the mail will bounce back to the
sender. |
LOCKFILE |
Global semaphore file. If this file already exists,
procmail will wait until it has gone before proceeding, and will
create it itself (cleaning it up when ready, of course). If more
than one lockfile are specified, then the previous one will
be removed before trying to create the new one. The use of a
global lockfile is discouraged, whenever possible use
locallockfiles (on a per recipe basis) instead. |
LOCKEXT |
Default extension that is appended to a destination
file to determine what local lockfile to use (only if
turned on, on a per-recipe basis). |
LOCKSLEEP |
Number of seconds procmail will sleep before
retrying on a lockfile (if it already existed); if not
specified, it defaults to 8 seconds. |
LOCKTIMEOUT |
Number of seconds that have to have passed since a
lockfile was last modified/created before procmail decides that
this must be an erroneously leftover lockfile that can be removed
by force now. If zero, then no timeout will be used and procmail
will wait forever until the lockfile is removed; if not specified,
it defaults to 1024 seconds. This variable is useful to prevent
indefinite hangups of sendmail/procmail. Procmail is immune
to clock skew across machines. |
TIMEOUT |
Number of seconds that have to have passed before
procmail decides that some child it started must be hanging. The
offending program will receive a TERMINATE signal from procmail,
and processing of the rcfile will continue. If zero, then no
timeout will be used and procmail will wait forever until the
child has terminated; if not specified, it defaults to 960
seconds. |
MSGPREFIX |
Filename prefix that is used when delivering to a
directory (not used when delivering to an MH directory). |
HOST |
If this is not the hostname of the machine,
processing of the current rcfile will immediately cease. If
other rcfiles were specified on the command line, processing will
continue with the next one. If all rcfiles are exhausted, the
program will terminate, but will not generate an error (i.e. to
the mailer it will seem that the mail has been delivered). |
UMASK |
The name says it all (if it doesn't, then forget
about this one :-). Anything assigned to UMASK is taken as an
octal number. If not specified, the umask defaults to 077.
If the umask permits o+x, all the mailboxes procmail delivers to
directly will receive an o+x mode change. This can be used to
check if new mail arrived. |
SHELLMETAS |
If any of the characters in SHELLMETAS appears in
the line specifying a filter or program, the line will be fed to
$SHELL instead of being executed directly. |
SHELLFLAGS |
Any invocation of $SHELL will be like: "$SHELL"
"$SHELLFLAGS" "$*"; |
SENDMAIL |
If you're not using the forwarding facility
don't worry about this one. It specifies the program being called
to forward any mail. It gets invoked as: "$SENDMAIL"
"$SENDMAILFLAGS" "$@"; |
NORESRETRY |
Number of retries that are to be made if any
`process table full', `file table full', `out of memory' or `out
of swap space' error should occur. If this number is negative,
then procmail will retry indefinitely; if not specified, it
defaults to 4 times. The retries occur with a $SUSPEND second
interval. The idea behind this is, that if e.g. the swap
space has been exhausted or the process table is full,
usually several other programs will either detect this as well and
abort or crash 8-), thereby freeing valuable resources for
procmail. |
SUSPEND |
Number of seconds that procmail will pause if it
has to wait for something that is currently unavailable (memory,
fork, etc.); if not spec- ified, it will default to 16 seconds.
See also: LOCKSLEEP. |
LINEBUF |
Length of the internal line buffers, cannot be set
smaller than 128. All lines read from the rcfile should not
exceed $LINEBUF characters before and after expansion. If not
specified, it defaults to 2048. This limit, of course, does
not apply to the mail itself, which can have arbitrary line
lengths, or could be a binary file for that matter. |
DELIVERED |
If set to `yes' procmail will pretend (to the mail
agent) the mail has been delivered. If mail cannot be delivered
after having met this assignment (set to `yes'), the mail will be
lost (i.e. it will not bounce). |
TRAP |
When procmail terminates it will execute the
contents of this variable. A copy of the mail can be read from
stdin. Any output produced by this command will be appended to
$LOGFILE. Possible uses for TRAP are: removal of temporary files,
logging customised abstracts, etc. See also EXITCODE and
LOGABSTRACT. |
EXITCODE |
When procmail terminates and this variable has been
set to a positive numeric value, procmail will use this as the
exitcode. If this variable is set but empty, procmail will set the
exitcode to whatever the TRAP program returns. If this
variable has not been set, procmail will set it shortly before
calling up the TRAP program. |
LASTFOLDER |
This variable is assigned to by procmail whenever
it is delivering to a folder or program. It always contains the
name of the last folder (or program) procmail delivered to. |
MATCH |
This variable is assigned to by procmail whenever
it is told to extract text from a matching regular expression. It
will contain all text matching the regular expression past the
`\/' token. |
SHIFT |
Assigning a positive value to this variable has the
same effect as the `shift' command in sh(1). This command
is most useful to extract extra arguments passed to procmail when
acting as a generic mailfilter. |
INCLUDERC |
Names an rcfile (relative to the current directory)
which will be included here as if it were part of the current
rcfile. Unlimited nesting is permitted. |
COMSAT |
Comsat(8)/biff(1) notification is on
by default, it can be turned off by setting this variable to `no'.
Alternatively the biff-service can be customised by setting it to
either `service@', `@hostname', or `service@hostname'. When not
specified it defaults to biff@localhost. |
DROPPRIVS |
If set to `yes' procmail will drop all privileges
it might have had (suid or sgid). This is only useful if you want
to guarantee that the bottom half of the /etc/procmailrc file is
executed on behalf of the recipient. |
Extended regular expressions The following tokens are known
to both the procmail internal egrep and the standard egrep(1)
(beware that some egrep implementations include other non-standard
extensions):
^ |
Start of a line. |
$ |
End of a line. |
. |
Any character except a newline. |
a* |
Any sequence of zero or more a's. |
a+ |
Any sequence of one or more a's. |
a? |
Either zero or one a. |
[^-a-d] |
Any character which is not either a dash, a,
b, c, d or newline. |
de|abc |
Either the sequence `de' or `abc'. |
(abc)* |
Zero or more times the sequence `abc'. |
\. |
Matches a single dot; use \ to quote any of the
magic characters to get rid of their special meaning. See also $\
variable substitution. |
These were only samples, of course, any more complex combination is
valid as well.
The following token meanings are special procmail extensions:
^ or $ |
Match a newline (for multiline matches). |
^^ |
Anchor the expression at the very start of the
search area, or if encountered at the end of the expression,
anchor it at the very end of the search area. |
\< or \> |
Match the character before or after a word. They
are merely a shorthand for `[^a-zA-Z0-9_]', but can also match
newlines. Since they match actual characters, they are only
suitable to delimit words, not to delimit inter-word space. |
\/ |
Splits the expression in two parts. Everything
matching the right part will be assigned to the MATCH environment
variable. |
- EXAMPLES
- Look in the procmailex(5)
man page.
- CAVEATS
- Continued lines in an action line that specifies a program always
have to end in a backslash, even if the underlying shell would not need
or want the backslash to indicate continuation. This is due to the two
pass parsing process needed (first procmail, then the shell (or not,
depending on SHELLMETAS)).
Don't put comments on the regular expression condition lines in a
recipe, these lines are fed to the internal egrep literally
(except for continuation backslashes at the end of a line).
Leading whitespace on continued regular expression condition lines is
usually ignored (so that they can be indented), but not on
continued condition lines that are evaluated according to the
sh(1) substitution rules inside double quotes.
Watch out for deadlocks when doing unhealthy things like forwarding
mail to your own account. Deadlocks can be broken by proper use of
LOCKTIMEOUT.
Any default values that procmail has for some environment variables
will always override the ones that were already defined. If you
really want to override the defaults, you either have to put them in the
rcfile or on the command line as arguments.
Environment variables set inside the shell-interpreted-`|'
action part of a recipe will not retain their value after the
recipe has finished since they are set in a subshell of procmail. To
make sure the value of an environment variable is retained you have to
put the assignment to the variable before the leading `|' of a recipe,
so that it can capture stdout of the program.
If you specify only a `h' or a `b' flag on a delivering recipe, and
the recipe matches, then, unless the `c' flag is present as well, the
body respectively the header of the mail will be silently lost.
- SEE ALSO
- procmail(1),
procmailsc(5),
procmailex(5),
sh(1), csh(1), mail(1), mailx(1), binmail(1), uucp(1), aliases(5),
sendmail(8), egrep(1), regexp(5), grep(1), biff(1), comsat(8),
lockfile(1),
formail(1)
- BUGS
- The only substitutions of environment variables that can be handled
by procmail itself are of the type $name, ${name}, ${name:-text},
${name:+text}, ${name-text}, ${name+text}, $\name, $#, $n, $$, $?, $_,
$- and $=; whereby $\name will be substituted by the
all-magic-regular-expression-characters-disarmed equivalent of $name, $_
by the name of the current rcfile, $- by $LASTFOLDER and $= will contain
the score of the last recipe. When the -a or -m options are used,
"$@" will expand to respectively the specified argument (list); but only
when passed as in the argument list to a program.
Procmail does not support the expansion of `~'.
A line buffer of length $LINEBUF is used when processing the rcfile,
any expansions have to fit within this limit; if they don't,
behaviour is undefined.
If the global lockfile has a relative path, and the current
directory is not the same as when the global lockfile was created, then
the global lockfile will not be removed if procmail exits at that point
(remedy: use absolute paths to specify global lockfiles).
If an rcfile has a relative path and when the rcfile is first
opened MAILDIR contains a relative path, and if at one point
procmail is instructed to clone itself and the current directory has
changed since the rcfile was opened, then procmail will not be able to
clone itself (remedy: use an absolute path to reference the
rcfile or make sure MAILDIR contains an absolute path as the rcfile is
opened).
A locallockfile on the recipe that marks the start of a non-forking
nested block does not work as expected.
When capturing stdout from a recipe into an environment variable,
exactly one trailing newline will be stripped.
- MISCELLANEOUS
- If the regular expression contains `^TO_' it will be
substituted by
|
`(^((Original-)?(Resent-)?(To|Cc|Bcc)|(X-Envelope|Apparently(-Resent)?)-To):(.*[^-a-zA-Z0-9_.])?)',
- which should catch all destination specifications containing a
specific address.
If the regular expression contains `^TO' it will be
substituted by |
`(^((Original-)?(Resent-)?(To|Cc|Bcc)|(X-Envelope|Apparently(-Resent)?)-To):(.*[^a-zA-Z])?)',
- which should catch all destination specifications containing a
specific word.
If the regular expression contains `^FROM_DAEMON' it will be
substituted by |
`(^(Precedence:.*(junk|bulk|list)|To: Multiple recipients of |(((Resent-)?(From|Sender)|X-Envelope-From):|>?From )([^>]*[^(.%@a-z0-9])?(Post(ma?(st(e?r)?|n)|office)|(send)?Mail(er)?|daemon|m(mdf|ajordomo)|n?uucp|LIST(SERV|proc)|NETSERV|o(wner|ps)|r(e(quest|sponse)|oot)|b(ounce|bs\.smtp)|echo|mirror|s(erv(ices?|er)|mtp(error)?|ystem)|A(dmin(istrator)?|MMGR|utoanswer))(([^).!:a-z0-9][-_a-z0-9]*)?[%@>\t ][^<)]*(\(.*\).*)?)?$([^>]|$)))',
- which should catch mails coming from most daemons (how's that for a
regular expression :-).
If the regular expression contains `^FROM_MAILER' it will be
substituted by |
`(^(((Resent-)?(From|Sender)|X-Envelope-From):|>?From )([^>]*[^(.%@a-z0-9])?(Post(ma(st(er)?|n)|office)|(send)?Mail(er)?|daemon|mmdf|n?uucp|ops|r(esponse|oot)|(bbs\.)?smtp(error)?|s(erv(ices?|er)|ystem)|A(dmin(istrator)?|MMGR))(([^).!:a-z0-9][-_a-z0-9]*)?[%@>\t ][^<)]*(\(.*\).*)?)?$([^>]|$))'
- (a stripped down version of `^FROM_DAEMON'), which should
catch mails coming from most mailer-daemons.
When assigning boolean values to variables like VERBOSE, DELIVERED or
COMSAT, procmail accepts as true every string starting with: a non-zero
value, `on', `y', `t' or `e'. False is every string starting with: a
zero value, `off', `n', `f' or `d'.
If the action line of a recipe specifies a program, a sole
backslash-newline pair in it on an otherwise empty line will be
converted into a newline.
The regular expression engine built into procmail does not support
named character classes.
- NOTES
- Since unquoted leading whitespace is generally ignored in the rcfile
you can indent everything to taste.
The leading `|' on the action line to specify a program or filter is
stripped before checking for $SHELLMETAS.
Files included with the INCLUDERC directive containing only
environment variable assignments can be shared with sh.
For really complicated processing you can even consider
calling procmail recursively.
In the old days, the `:0' that marks the beginning of a recipe, had
to be changed to `:n', whereby `n' denotes the number of conditions that
follow.
- AUTHOR
- Stephen R. van den Berg
1997/04/11
|
SPEEDEX サポートポリシー
Copyright @ Cyber Vision Hosting Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.
株式会社サイバービジョンホスティング提供サービス一覧
再販売用レンタルサーバーのSPEEDEX | VPS(仮想専用サーバー) | 共用サーバー | 専用サーバー | 独自ドメイン取得・運用 | SSLサーバー証明書 | ワイルドカードサーバー証明書
WindowsデータバックアップのDataShelter | 事業者向け再販売用Windowsデータバックアップ | クリエイティブワークの検索エンジン
|