hi graham, begin Graham Freeman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Howdy, > > About 2 weeks ago I broke my procmail filters in such a way that they > started silently discarding most of my e-mail for about 6 hours
OMG! i've always found that procmail is _really_ good about having the least destructive default action. that's AWFUL. > until I > discovered the problem and (for lack of time) disabled all my procmail > filters. Fortunately I retained the mail server logs, so I can probably > figure out at least whose e-mail I missed. fwiw, whenever i make a change to my procmail filter, i always send test msgs to make sure it works. there are fancy shmansy ways of doing this, but telnetting to your SMTP port and sending email with various From: and Subject: lines works for me. i don't test everything, but it at least a few test emails ups my confidence that i haven't made a huge error. > Now that I've been able to find & fix the problem with my filters, I need > some way to apply the filters to the ~3,000 unfiltered messages that wound > up in my inbox since then. I'd really prefer not to have to go through > these messages by hand. Unfortunately, all the procmail documentation I > can find assumes that you're using it only as the e-mail comes in, not on > an existing mailbox. > > Can anyone tell me how to apply my existing .procmailrc to my existing > /var/mail/graham inbox file? sure. cp /var/mail/graham graham.backup mv /var/mail/graham graham.old formail -s procmail < graham.old the -s option causes standard input to be split into separate emails, and then feed them individually to the program specified immediately after the -s option. the reason why you have to move /var/mail/graham to graham.old is because email taken from /var/mail/graham which doesn't match a recipe is sent to your default mailbox, which happens to be right back into /var/mail/graham. a nice endless loop. the reason for the first "cp" is "just because". it's a good idea. :) hth, pete _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
