I think that one of the things that up and coming Linux admins are
supposed to do is write a "Procmail is dead" article and post it
somewhere. It sure seems like it there's enough of them out there.
Procmail isn't dead. However, the Procmail website is simply in
an awful and atrocious state. It has been at least a half a decade
since the server the website is on stopped hosting the distro, which
is frankly ridiculous. OK I get that the domain owner doesn't want
to spring the money for the bandwidth but there are better ways to
handle it than an HTTP error. I also get that the domain owner isn't
interested in fixing his HTML. OK whatever.
There's a lot of distributions that include Procmail and lots and
lots of people using it. There's still people writing patches for
it for their distros. Yes it lacks a maintainer which is a shame.
But it is even more shameful that RedHat and the other pay distributions
aren't stepping up and picking up maintenance of it.
I use procmail, but I don't use it to call SpamAssassin. Nor do I
use it with any extensive recipes.
Ted
On 10/28/2014 11:43 AM, jdow wrote:
On 2014-10-28 11:24, David F. Skoll wrote:
On Tue, 28 Oct 2014 10:24:37 -0700
jdow <j...@earthlink.net> wrote:
Sure, but that doesn't mean a consummate chef need fear them!
Nonetheless one should keep bare knife switches away from said chef
lest he forget that being an consummate expert in one field does not
make him even barely competent in other fields.
Yes, well. I've spent the last 13 years of my life creating a company
whose products are all in the email security space with most of the
critical
logic written in Perl. I may be barely competent in some fields, but
I do claim a certain competence in using Perl to mess with email. :)
I also suspect that most SpamAssassin admins probably have some
competence with perl.
Anyway, we are drifting OT here I guess...
Regards,
David.
That is hardly a compelling reason to change from procmail to perl, for
me or others with working procmail systems. You seem to be advocating
handing me perl and turning me loose after ripping procmail out of my
hands. That does not endear you to me. It isn't broken. So why fix it?
There is a tremendous amount of experience out there setting it up and
using it. Is that a reason to discard it for something new? We're seeing
the fruits of that sort of divisiveness with the systemd controversy. If
fix means better and still 100% compatible it is an easy sell. If fix
means 0% compatible being better is not good for people with better
things upon which to spend their time than learning a new way shoved
down their throats. In the abstract you are right. In the practical,
that "rightness" appears to tarnish.
In the case in point early on in this discussion it is quite easy to
tell procmail to add a new header X-been-through-my-spamfilter. Then
look for that header before feeding to spamassassin in the procmail
script. If it appears merely deliver the mail. If it doesn't exist
filter it and feed it to the next step. That is NOT a huge effort in
procmail if somebody has already embraced learning the damnfool thing.
Why condemn the poor sod to learning something new rather than fixing
other aspects of his system?
Not all of us here are email adminstrators. Many are working with
smaller systems and manage the entire system more or less single handed
or with limited help because their employer is cheap.
{^_^} Joanne
{o.o}
