On Tuesday 02 September 2003 03:10 pm, HaywireMac wrote: > Most of the guides and tutorials I see use ~/.procmalrc as an example, > for use with Fetchmail. > > Now, I would like my machine to run Fetchmail as a system service, then > have Procmail twiddle with the mail once it's been delivered to the > appropriate maildirs, ie. /var/spool/mail/[username]. > > Am I barking up the wrong tree here? Can a systemwide Procmail config > deal with multiple user accounts that have their mail delivered with > Fetchmail, or should I be using Postfix instead of Fetchmail (can > Postfix retrieve mail from a POP server?!) > > Brain...feels...sore...
Fetchmail usually delivers mail directly to Postfix which then does the local delivery, passing through procmail at that point or afterward. Fetchmail can also deliver mail through procmail but procmail would have to act as an mda, mail delivery agent, to put the mail directly into the maildir folders or mbox file depending on your preference. The recommended setup is for fetchmail to pull mail from a pop and deliver to an mta (postfix or sendmail) which then does the local delivery. This allows you to use procmail or whatever other filtering agents you want on all mail, regardless of who it is going to and to use mta aliases to insure that the right pop mail goes to the right local accounts. BTW, Postfix will NOT retrieve mail from a POP server, it can request the server to push mail to it, if the POP server is configured to do so, but most individuals will not have an ISP that does this for them unless they are running a business account with their own domain name that is hosted by the ISP. You might be better off telling us what you are trying to do with procmail, fetchmail, etc. and let us make suggestions that will work for you. Personally, I want procmail to do its business before mail hits the local account, that way, the most egregious spam is already dealt with, mail from people on the blacklist gets trashed before it gets to a local mailbox and viruses and the like are filtered before they get to the local users mailbox. YMMV. There is also no reason why you can't do both, use procmail at a system level for major filtering and then if you want to use procmail at the local level to sort mail into folders, do that using a mail client that pipes messages through a local promail recipe. That depends on the flexibility of the email client. -- Bryan Phinney Software Test Engineer
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