Re: procmail
On Wed, Oct 03, 2001 at 07:31:49PM -0400, Stephen Gran wrote:
> Thus spake alephtnull@gmx.net:
> > if I use procmail, do I still need fetchmail? or exim/qmail? or procmail
> > can do the filtering, sending and receiving mail...
>
> apropos procmail:
> procmail (1) - autonomous mail processor
>
> From the http://packages.debian.org site:
> Can be used to create mail-servers, mailing lists, sort your incoming
> mail into separate folders/files (real convenient when subscribing to
> one or more mailing lists or for prioritising your mail), preprocess
> your mail, start any programs upon mail arrival (e.g. to generate
> different chimes on your workstation for different types of mail) or
> selectively forward certain incoming mail automatically to someone.
> From grep procmail /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.us.debian.org_debian_dists_woody_main_binary-i386_Packages (sorry about the long wrap):
> Recommends: exim | sendmail | mail-transport-agent | fetchmail
>
> So, it looks like yes.
Procmail cannot download email from your isp all by itself, nor can it
send mail over the internet. Procmail was designed to process incoming
mail in various ways using regular expressions and is good at it. In
following the unix ideal of doing one thing well and letting others
do everything else, procmail relies on other programs to process mail
over the internet, etc. Procmail is not a spooler by design, and
cannot actually do anything to mail on it's own except for deliver it
to local mail files. It can change the mail destination if you tell it
to, but for anything else it relies on externel programs. It is very
much like a shell script in that way. It CAN be used as PART of a mail
server... but only as the filtering/processing part. It can't actually
BE a mail-server all by itself however. In short, you WILL need other
programs such as exim and fetchmail in order to be able to use email.
--
John Patton patton66@home.com
"Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most
fools do." - Dale Carnegie
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