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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!serv.hinet.net!spring.edu.tw!howland.erols.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!nntp-hub2.barrnet.net!news.Stanford.EDU!andrsn.stanford.edu!andrsn From: andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu (Annelise Anderson) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: .forward file format Date: 26 Oct 1996 18:57:17 GMT Organization: Stanford University Lines: 88 Message-ID: <54tmud$k8g@nntp.Stanford.EDU> References: <54olal$h5u@uuneo.neosoft.com> <54orfi$jte@uuneo.neosoft.com> <54rg7t$9cj@nntp.Stanford.EDU> <54rote$bsc@nntp.Stanford.EDU> <54s8l5$bqs@uuneo.neosoft.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: andrsn.stanford.edu X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Conrad Sabatier (conrads@neosoft.com) wrote: : In article <54rote$bsc@nntp.Stanford.EDU>, : Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> wrote: : >Annelise Anderson (andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu) wrote: : >: Conrad Sabatier (conrads@neosoft.com) wrote: : > : >: : Could it be because I'm using popclient to retrieve my mail from my ISP's : >: : POP3 server? : > : >: Yes, I think so. I get some mail from a POP3 server and it goes : >: directly into a mail box and never gets processed by procmail. : >: Other mail comes to the queue, and when I process the queue the mail : >: is then dealt with by the .forward file; my has : > : >: "|IFS=' '&&p=/usr/local/bin/procmail&&test -f $p&&exec $p -Yf-||exit 75 #andrsn" : > : >: which looks pretty much like yours. : > : >: However, I think you can tell the popserver to put the mail wherever you : >: want it--you might want to try telling it to put it in /var/spool/mqueue. : > : >This won't work--but the man page for procmail says that it will process : >an already filled (the key word to search for) mailbox. There's a : >script for doing so that assumes the mail is put in /var/mail/username. : >So if you run popclient and then the script (extract it from the man : >page) it will process the mail in accordance with your .procmailrc. : Yes...but...*how*??? : My shell programming skills leave much to be desired. As I said, running : procmail manually (the script from man procmail mentioned above) on an : already-loaded /var/mail/$LOGNAME mailbox works beautifully. : OK, so popclient stuffs everything into the /var/mail/$LOGNAME inbox, and : then I need to run procmail (the script) on it. : So how can I automate this process? : Or can I pipe popclient's output to sendmail/procmail? : Help? Please? : I *really* need to get this thing working! The junk mail these days is : driving me nuts! : Many thanks! Okay, Conrad, try this: 1) do man procmail > procmail.txt (in your home directory) 2) open procmail.txt with vi and use :se nu to get line numbers. Search for filled with /filled to find the script. Export it to a file with :780,800w procscript, where the numbers 780 and 800 are the line numbers where the script occurs. chmod 700 procscript so that procscript is executable. Open procscript with a text editor and get rid of the white space on any lines farthest to the left. 3) run popclient with a line something like popclient -u conrads -p yourpassword -o /var/mail/conrads your/pop/server 4) then run procscript (just type procscript or sh procscript) If I were doing it I'd make a copy of /var/mail/username first, copy the contents of another mailbox there, and test it to make sure it did what I expected. 5) when you're sure this is running create a file, say conmail, that has two lines: first the popclient line, then just a line with the word procscript; actually it should have three lines, the first #!/bin/sh so it knows it's a script. 6) run conmail when you want to get yourmail 7) when this is working put the conmail line in your .login file 8) if you want it to run--both popclient and procscript, which can now be called with the conmail script--frequently and automatically, you can either add it to /etc/crontab or create a user crontab with the crontab command. These two crontab files have different formats (the user crontab has no column for who runs the script; other than that they're alike) and live in different places. See crontab(5) and crontab(8). The line you want in there, along with the stuff on how often to run it, is /usr/home/conrads/conmail. Back up /etc/crontab before editing it (this is the easier way to do this). You might need a file called allow in the directory with the user crontab if you choose that route; see the man pages for what needs to be in it. This is what you'd want to do if you have more than one user on the machine. 9) Keep in mind that while I've run the script we're calling procscript here, I haven't actually done the rest of it so this comes without warranty! Annelise