22.13 Using procmail

Contributed by Marc Silver.

The procmail utility is an incredibly powerful application used to filter incoming mail. It allows users to define ``rules'' which can be matched to incoming mails to perform specific functions or to reroute mail to alternative mailboxes and/or email addresses. procmail can be installed using the mail/procmail port. Once installed, it can be directly integrated into most MTAs; consult your MTA documentation for more information. Alternatively, procmail can be integrated by adding the following line to a .forward in the home directory of the user utilizing procmail features:

"|exec /usr/local/bin/procmail || exit 75"

The following section will display some basic procmail rules, as well as brief descriptions on what they do. These rules, and others must be inserted into a .procmailrc file, which must reside in the user's home directory.

The majority of these rules can also be found in the procmailex(5) manual page.

Forward all mail from <user@example.com> to an external address of <goodmail@example2.com>:

:0
* ^From.*user@example.com
! goodmail@example2.com

Forward all mails shorter than 1000 bytes to an external address of <goodmail@example2.com>:

:0
* < 1000
! goodmail@example2.com

Send all mail sent to <alternate@example.com> into a mailbox called alternate:

:0
* ^TOalternate@example.com
alternate

Send all mail with a subject of ``Spam'' to /dev/null:

:0
^Subject:.*Spam
/dev/null

A useful recipe that parses incoming FreeBSD.org mailing lists and places each list in its own mailbox:

:0
* ^Sender:.owner-freebsd-\/[^@]+@FreeBSD.ORG
{
    LISTNAME=${MATCH}
    :0
    * LISTNAME??^\/[^@]+
    FreeBSD-${MATCH}
}