The Answer Guy

Procmail Arguments

From D. Scott Lowrie on Mon, 19 Jun 2000

hi,

I've been able to use procmail when I send the mail to &myuserid+keyword.

Where I assign a variable (say PLUSARG=$1).

I can use the variable PLUSARG to base some procmail recipes. So what's the question??? well it seems if I us and alieas set up for me and the "+keyword" syntax that procmail doesn't pass the "+keyword" in as the $1 parameter. E.G. $1 is found when I use myid+keyword but not with alieasId+keyword. thanks,

Scott Lowrie

I think that your mailer (sendmail) is actually the culprit. I think that the MTA is stripping out everything from the + to the @ since (since that's how it figures out which mailbox is the intended recipient with the old "plusaddressing" convention).

It seems to be that the ^TO macro in procmail does expose the header address (which retains the + extension) while the envelope address is being passed to your PLUSARG.

Try using the ^TO pattern.

procmail arguement list

From D. Scott Lowrie on Tue, 20 Jun 2000

thanks for the suggestion ... I really appreciate your help.

Scott FYI I'll let you know what we are doing with the "+arguement" -

its not all that clever but in our case makes for an easy way to add things to our online documentation. Perhaps some other user may find this useful for simple/quick documentation.

The simple idea is that we have a userid called "caddoc" and if you have an email that others may find useful (perhaps like the tip you just gave me!) then we just would send/forward/cc/bcc to "caddoc+mailtips". The procmail script then processes the caddoc to signify you want to document something; the +mailtips to signifiy you want it in our "mailtips" archive area; and then uses "mhonarc" to add this email in html format to the data area defined in the "mhonarc" call. So with just a simple addition of "caddoc+mailtips" we get the info tucked away for future reference. The alternative of swipping the data; putting this data in a file in the mailtips area; updating the index.html would also work but the reality is "our natural laziness" makes it unlikely to happen.

Scott Lowrie

Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 55 July 2000

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