berg@physik.tu-muenchen.de (Stephen R. van den Berg) (06/11/91)
I just posted to comp.sources.misc:
The procmail mail processing program. (v2.01 1991/06/11)
Can be used to create mail-servers, mailing lists, sort your incoming mail
into separate folders/files (real convenient when subscribing to one or more
mailing lists), preprocess your mail, or selectively forward certain incoming
mail automatically to someone (for a more extensive feature list, see below).
As you can see below, I attacked and solved the problem of NFS mounted
lockfiles.
--
Feature summary for procmail:
+ Easy to install
+ Simple to maintain and configure because
all you need is actually only ONE executable (procmail)
and ONE configuration file (.procmailrc)
+ Uses *your* (i.e. easily configurable) favourite regular expression
syntax
+ Allows for very-easy-to-use yes-no decisions on where the mail
should go
+ Filters, delivers and forwards mail *reliably*
+ Provides a stable and guaranteed environment for any programs or
shell scripts you may wish to start upon mail arrival
+ Is designed for reliability, once procmail gets hold of your mail
you can consider it delivered
+ Is event driven (i.e. gets invoked automagically when mail arrives)
+ Performs heroically under even the worst conditions
(file system full, out of swap space, process table full,
file table full, missing support files, unavailable executables,
denied permissions) and tries to deliver the mail somehow anyway
(it usually succeeds were other programs would have given up)
+ procmail is the closest you can get to a program that outlives
the swapper :-)
+ Absolutely undeliverable mail (after trying every trick in the book)
will bounce back to the sender
+ Does not use *any* temporary files
+ Is explicitly designed to work under NFS as well
+ Performs more reliable mailbox locking than most other mailers
(especially across NFS, DON'T use NFS mounted mailboxes WITHOUT
installing procmail, you may use valuable mail one day)
+ Supports both mailfolder standards (single file folders (standard
*NIX format) as well as directory folders (AMS -- Andrew Mail System)
that contain one file per message)
+ Variable assignment and substitution is a subset of the standard
/bin/sh syntax
+ Provides a mail log file, which logs all mail arrival, shows
in summary whence it came from, what it was about, where it went
(what folder) and how long (in bytes) it was
+ Uses this log file to display a wide range of diagnostic and error
messages (if something went wrong)
+ Processed mail can contain arbitrary 8-bit characters (including
'\0'); i.e. binary mailings can be processed if the rest of the
mailing system knew how to handle them too
+ It has a man page (boy, does *it* have a man page)
+ It can be used as a local delivery agent (substitute for /bin/mail)
Feature summary for formail:
+ Can generate auto-reply headers
+ Can force mail into mailbox format (so that you can process it with
standard mail programs)
+ Can split up mailboxes into the individual messages
+ Can split up digests into the individual messages
Feature summary for lockfile:
+ Provides NFS-secure lockfiles to shell script programmers
--
Sincerely, berg@messua.informatik.rwth-aachen.de
Stephen R. van den Berg. berg@physik.tu-muenchen.de
"And now for something *completely* different!"