"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"
Mail for the Home Network
Procmail
By and
Procmail
For purposes of this article, all we want procmail to do is to put the mail in the users' account in /var/spool/mail. As such, remove all ~/.procmailrc and ~/.forward files from each user's home directory. Procmail deserves its own article, so we will not cover it here. For our purposes, as long as procmail is installed on your server, things will work.
Procmail is a very powerful program. After your home mail system is setup completely, here is what procmail can do for you:
- Sets the appropriate variables
- Creates a backup cache of messages so that, if anything goes wrong, you always have the last 100 messages you received.
- Filter out mailing list mail into a "Bulk Mail" folder.
- Filter the remaining mail for spam, either deleting the spam or putting it into a separate folder, as you prefer, and tagging suspicious email/probable spam and filing it separately from non-spam email.
- Deliver the filtered personal mail to your inbox, where you can read it with Eudora or a POP program, or on shell with elm or pine.
Copyright © 1999, JC Pollman and Bill Mote
Published in Issue 45 of Linux Gazette, September 1999