"Thomas J. Hamman" wrote:
> Could somebody please point me to some documentation for setting up procmail to
> filter E-mail? The man pages aren't very helpful to someone completely new to
> filtering with procmail, and I've been following the Procmail Quickstart guide
> at http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/qs/ but unfortunately the line it
> said to put in my .forward file failed me.
>
> I set up my .procmailrc and .forward files as directed by the aforementioned
> quickstart guide. I then tried sending myself a test mail from Pine, and then
> ran fetchmail (which is properly set up) to try receiving the mail.
>
> The test mail, after being retrieved (and deleted from the server), was nowhere
> to be found on my hard drive. Then I retrieved my mail with XFMail and
> received a mail with the subject "Returned mail: Service unavailable" which had
> this in the body:
>
> The original message was received at Mon, 18 Oct 1999 21:52:47 -0400
> from localhost [127.0.0.1]
>
> ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
> "|IFS=' ' && exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #hawk3"
> (expanded from: <hawk3@localhost>)
>
> ----- Transcript of session follows -----
> sh: cannot use & in command
> 554 "|IFS=' ' && exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #hawk3"... Service
> unavailable
>
> I assume from that message that there is something wrong with the
> .forward file which contains this line:
>
> "|IFS=' ' && exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #hawk3"
>
> This is exactly what the Quickstart guide said to use, except that I changed
> the path to correctly point to where Mandrake installs procmail, and I used my
> user ID instead of the example's, of course.
>
> If there is just a small adjustment I should be making to the .forward file,
> can someone tell me what it is? On the other hand, if there is other
> documentation that could give me more useable information on setting up mail
> filters with procmail, could somebody point me to it?
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> -Tom
Tom,
I think I need to see the line before that one as well. The pipe established on
that line has to be from something. Better yet, a copy of the file where it is.
I see a shell error being reported which indicates a syntax problem is isolating
an '&' somehow.
One elementary check is to make sure the example line isn't using ` (lowercase of
the uppercase ~ key) where you are using ' (lowercase of the uppercase " key) .
Civileme
