quits. Alternatively, the MUA can be configured to execute Procmail any time a message is
received so that messages are moved into their correct mailboxes. By default, the presence of
/etc/procmailrc
or of a
.procmailrc
file (also called an rc file) in the user's home directory
invokes Procmail whenever an MTA receives a new message.
Whether Procmail acts upon an email message depends upon whether the message matches a
specified set of conditions or recipes in the
rc
file. If a message matches a recipe, then the
email is placed in a specified file, is deleted, or is otherwise processed.
When Procmail starts, it reads the email message and separates the body from the header
information. Next, Procmail looks for
/etc/procmailrc
and
rc
files in the
/etc/procmailrcs
directory for default, system-wide, Procmail environmental variables and recipes. Procmail then
searches for a
.procmailrc
file in the user's home directory. Many users also create additional
rc
files for Procmail that are referred to within the
.procmailrc
file in their home directory.
By default, no system-wide
rc
files exist in the
/etc/
directory and no
.procmailrc
files exist in
any user's home directory. Therefore, to use Procmail, each user must construct a
.procmailrc
file with specific environment variables and rules.
4.1. Procmail Configuration
The Procmail configuration file contains important environmental variables. These variables
specify things such as which messages to sort and what to do with the messages that do not
match any recipes.
These environmental variables usually appear at the beginning of
.procmailrc
in the following
format:
<env-variable>="<value>"
In this example,
<env-variable>
is the name of the variable and
<value>
defines the variable.
There are many environment variables not used by most Procmail users and many of the more
important environment variables are already defined by a default value. Most of the time, the
following variables are used:
•
DEFAULT
— Sets the default mailbox where messages that do not match any recipes are
placed.
The default
DEFAULT
value is the same as
$ORGMAIL
.
•
INCLUDERC
— Specifies additional
rc
files containing more recipes for messages to be
checked against. This breaks up the Procmail recipe lists into individual files that fulfill
different roles, such as blocking spam and managing email lists, that can then be turned off or
on by using comment characters in the user's
.procmailrc
file.
For example, lines in a user's
.procmailrc
file may look like this:
Procmail Configuration
201
Summary of Contents for ENTERPRISE LINUX 4.5.0 -
Page 1: ...Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 5 0 4 5 0 Reference Guide ISBN N A Publication date ...
Page 2: ...Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 5 0 ...
Page 4: ...Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 5 0 ...
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Page 395: ...Part IV Appendixes ...
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