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Procmail and regular expressions....(Snowwhite...)

From Andrew Higgs

Answered By Ben Okopnik, Mike Orr, Faber Fedor

Hi all,

While on the subject....any suggestions on a good place to find out about regular expressions and procmail.

I collect mail from one ISP mailbox and send it on to the correct user based on email address. I also have a problem with people who use mailing list groups in Outlook etc. How do I split these properly?

Any pointers gratiously accepted.

[Ben] "procmail" uses extended regexes, much the same as "egrep". So, for some good examples and broad-scope explanations of those, try

man procmailex
man procmailrc
man grep         # The "REGULAR EXPRESSIONS" section is a great reference
man regex        # Somewhat different "flavor", but useful

For single address to multiple local user resolution, read the "Email Addressing FAQ (How to use user+box@host addresses)" at www.faqs.org/faqs/mail/addressing/ - as it happens, I just ran into this thing yesterday, and was much impressed with the logical style and layout of it. Even if this is not exactly what you're doing, there are a number of relevant useful techniques described in this document - and it's mostly based on doing it with "procmail".

[Mike] Ben! You even wrote the article about procmail antispam filtering and you didn't mention it. Just in case Andrew hasn't seen it:

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue62/okopnik.html

[Faber] Let me through out this little tidbit:

If you use the \< and \> word boundary markers in procmail, keep in mind that they consume (eat) the word boundary. Every other program I've used the word boundary markers on did not eat them.

Makes a BIG difference when your grepping your text (and took me an hour to figure out!).

Regards,
Faber Fedor

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