Procmail

Version 3.10 of procmail, lockfile, formail and mailstat will be install for Ultrix 4.3, OSF3.2, SunOS 4.1.3, Solaris 5.3, IRIX 5.2 and AIX 3.2 will be installed tomorrow 8/10/95.

The following changes will be made:

In /exp/rcf/share/bin:
procmail -> procmail-3.10
procmail.old -> procmail-2.91
lockfile -> lockfile-3.10
lockfile.old -> lockfile-2.91
formail -> formail-3.10
formail.old -> formail-2.91
mailstat -> mailstat-3.10
mailstat.old -> mailstat-2.91
The following man pages will be updates in /exp/rcf/common/man
formail.1, lockfile.1, procmail.1, procmailex.5, procmailsc.5, procmailrc.5
What is procmail?

Procmail should be invoked automatically over the .forward file mechanism as soon as mail arrives. When invoked, it first sets some environment variables to default values, reads the mail message from stdin until an EOF, separates the body from the header, and then, if no command line arguments are present, it starts to look for a file named $HOME/.procmailrc. According to the processing recipes in this file, the mail message that just arrived gets distributed into the right folder (and more). If no rcfile is found, or processing of the rcfile falls off the end, procmail will store the mail in the default system mailbox.

What is formail?

formail is a filter that can be used to force mail into mailbox format, perform `From ' escaping, generate auto- replying headers, do simple header munging/extracting or split up a mailbox/digest/articles file. The mail/mailbox/article contents will be expected on stdin. If formail is supposed to determine the sender of the mail, but is unable to find any, it will substitute `foo@bar'. If formail is started without any command line options, it will force any mail coming from stdin into mailbox format and will escape all bogus `From ' lines with a `>'.

What is lockfile?

lockfile can be used to create one or more semaphore files. If lockfile can't create all the specified files (in the specified order), it waits sleeptime (defaults to 8) seconds and retries the last file that didn't succeed. You can specify the number of retries to do until failure is returned. If the number of retries is -1 (default, i.e. -r-1) lockfile will retry forever.

What is mailstat?

mailstat shows mail-arrival statistics
Parses a procmail-generated $LOGFILE and displays a summary about the messages delivered to all folders (total size, average size, nr of messages). Exit code 0 if mail arrived, 1 if no mail arrived.