PROCMAILRC(5) PROCMAILRC(5)
NAME
procmailrc - procmail rcfile
SYNOPSIS
$HOME/.procmailrc
DESCRIPTION
For a quick start, see NOTES at the end of the procmail(1) man page.
The rcfile can contain a mixture of environment variable assignments
(some of which have special meanings to procmail), and recipes. In
their most simple appearance, the recipes are simply one line regular
expressions that are searched for in the header of the arriving mail.
The first recipe that matches is used to determine where the mail has
to go (usually a file). If processing falls off the end of the rcfile,
procmail will deliver the mail to $DEFAULT.
There are two kinds of recipes: delivering and non-delivering recipes.
If a delivering recipe is found to match, procmail considers the mail
(you guessed it) delivered and will cease processing the rcfile after
having successfully executed the action line of the recipe. If a non-
delivering recipe is found to match, processing of the rcfile will con
tinue after the action line of this recipe has been executed.
Delivering recipes are those that cause header and/or body of the mail
to be: written into a file, absorbed by a program or forwarded to a
mailaddress.
Non-delivering recipes are: those that cause the output of a program or
filter to be captured back by procmail or those that start a nesting
block.
You can tell procmail to treat a delivering recipe as if it were a non-
delivering recipe by specifying the c flag on such a recipe. This
will make procmail generate a carbon copy of the mail by delivering it
to this recipe, yet continue processing the rcfile.
By using any number of recipes you can presort your mail extremely
straightforward into several mailfolders. Bear in mind though that the
mail can arrive concurrently in these mailfolders (if several procmail
programs happen to run at the same time, not unlikely if a lot of mail
arrives). To make sure this does not result in a mess, proper use of
lockfiles is highly recommended.
The environment variable assignments and recipes can be freely inter
mixed in the rcfile. If any environment variable has a special meaning
to procmail, it will be used appropriately the moment it is parsed
(i.e., you can change the current directory whenever you want by speci
fying a new MAILDIR, switch lockfiles by specifying a new LOCKFILE,
change the umask at any time, etc., the possibilities are endless :-).
The assignments and substitutions of these environment variables are
handled exactly like in sh(1) (that includes all possible quotes and
escapes), with the added bonus that blanks around the = sign are
ignored and that, if an environment variable appears without a trailing
=, it will be removed from the environment. Any program in back
quotes started by procmail will have the entire mail at its stdin.
Comments
A word beginning with # and all the following characters up to a NEW
LINE are ignored. This does not apply to condition lines, which cannot
be commented.
Recipes
A line starting with : marks the beginning of a recipe. It has the
following format:
:0 [flags] [ : [locallockfile] ]
Conditions start with a leading *, everything after that character is
passed on to the internal egrep literally, except for leading and
trailing whitespace. These regular expressions are completely compati
ble to the normal egrep(1) extended regular expressions. See also
Extended regular expressions.
Conditions are anded; if there are no conditions the result will be
true by default.
Flags can be any of the following:
H Egrep the header (default).
B Egrep the body.
D Tell the internal egrep to distinguish between upper and lower
case (contrary to the default which is to ignore case).
A This recipe will not be executed unless the conditions on the last
preceding recipe (on the current block-nesting level) without the
A or a flag matched as well. This allows you to chain actions
that depend on a common condition.
a Has the same meaning as the A flag, with the additional condi
tion that the immediately preceding recipe must have been success
fully completed before this recipe is executed.
E This recipe only executes if the immediately preceding recipe was
not executed. Execution of this recipe also disables any immedi
ately following recipes with the E flag. This allows you to
specify else if actions.
e This recipe only executes if the immediately preceding recipe
failed (i.e., the action line was attempted, but resulted in an
error).
h Feed the header to the pipe, file or mail destination (default).
b Feed the body to the pipe, file or mail destination (default).
f Consider the pipe as a filter.
c Generate a carbon copy of this mail. This only makes sense on
delivering recipes. The only non-delivering recipe this flag has
an effect on is on a nesting block, in order to generate a carbon
copy this will clone the running procmail process (lockfiles will
not be inherited), whereby the clone will proceed as usual and the
parent will jump across the block.
w Wait for the filter or program to finish and check its exitcode
(normally ignored); if the filter is unsuccessful, then the text
will not have been filtered.
W Has the same meaning as the w flag, but will suppress any Pro
gram failure message.
i Ignore any write errors on this recipe (i.e., usually due to an
early closed pipe).
r Raw mode, do not try to ensure the mail ends with an empty line,
write it out as is.
There are some special conditions you can use that are not straight
regular expressions. To select them, the condition must start with:
! Invert the condition.
$ Evaluate the remainder of this condition according to sh(1) sub
stitution rules inside double quotes, skip leading whitespace,
then reparse it.
? Use the exitcode of the specified program.
< Check if the total length of the mail is shorter than the speci
fied (in decimal) number of bytes.
> Analogous to <.
variablename ??
Match the remainder of this condition against the value of this
environment variable (which cannot be a pseudo variable). A spe
cial case is if variablename is equal to B, H, HB or BH;
this merely overrides the default header/body search area defined
by the initial flags on this recipe.
\ To quote any of the above at the start of the line.
Local lockfile
If you put a second (trailing) : on the first recipe line, then proc
mail will use a locallockfile (for this recipe only). You can option
ally specify the locallockfile to use; if you dont however, procmail
will use the destination filename (or the filename following the first
>>) and will append $LOCKEXT to it.
Recipe action line
The action line can start with the following characters:
! Forwards to all the specified mail addresses.
| Starts the specified program, possibly in $SHELL if any of the
characters $SHELLMETAS are spotted. You can optionally prepend
this pipe symbol with variable=, which will cause stdout of the
program to be captured in the environment variable (procmail
will not terminate processing the rcfile at this point). If you
specify just this pipe symbol, without any program, then proc
mail will pipe the mail to stdout.
{ Followed by at least one space, tab or newline will mark the
start of a nesting block. Everything up till the next closing
brace will depend on the conditions specified for this recipe.
Unlimited nesting is permitted. The closing brace exists merely
to delimit the block, it will not cause procmail to terminate in
any way. If the end of a block is reached processing will con
tinue as usual after the block. On a nesting block, the flags
H and B only affect the conditions leading up to the block,
the flags h and b have no effect whatsoever.
Anything else will be taken as a mailbox name (either a filename or a
directory, absolute or relative to the current directory (see
MAILDIR)). If it is a (possibly yet nonexistent) filename, the mail
will be appended to it.
If it is a directory, the mail will be delivered to a newly created,
guaranteed to be unique file named $MSGPREFIX* in the specified direc
tory. If the mailbox name ends in "/.", then this directory is pre
sumed to be an MH folder; i.e., procmail will use the next number it
finds available. If the mailbox name ends in "/", then this directory
is presumed to be a maildir folder; i.e., procmail will deliver the
message to a file in a subdirectory named "tmp" and rename it to be
inside a subdirectory named "new". If the mailbox is specified to be
an MH folder or maildir folder, procmail will create the necessary
directories if they dont exist, rather than treat the mailbox as a
non-existent filename. When procmail is delivering to directories, you
can specify multiple directories to deliver to (procmail will do so
utilising hardlinks).
Environment variable defaults
LOGNAME, HOME and SHELL
Your (the recipients) defaults
PATH $HOME/bin :/usr/local/bin :/usr/bin :/bin (Except
during the processing of an /etc/procmailrc file,
when it will be set to /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin
:/bin.)
SHELLMETAS &|<>~;?*[
SHELLFLAGS -c
ORGMAIL /var/mail/$LOGNAME
(Unless -m has been specified, in which case it
is unset)
MAILDIR $HOME
(Unless the name of the first successfully opened
rcfile starts with ./ or if -m has been speci
fied, in which case it defaults to .)
DEFAULT $ORGMAIL
MSGPREFIX msg.
SENDMAIL /usr/sbin/sendmail
SENDMAILFLAGS -oi
HOST The current hostname
COMSAT no
(If an rcfile is specified on the command line)
PROCMAIL_VERSION 3.22
LOCKEXT .lock
Other cleared or preset environment variables are IFS, ENV and PWD.
For security reasons, upon startup procmail will wipe out all environ
ment variables that are suspected of modifying the behavior of the run
time linker.
Environment
Before you get lost in the multitude of environment variables, keep in
mind that all of them have reasonable defaults.
MAILDIR Current directory while procmail is executing (that means
that all paths are relative to $MAILDIR).
DEFAULT Default mailbox file (if not told otherwise, procmail will
dump mail in this mailbox). Procmail will automatically
use $DEFAULT$LOCKEXT as lockfile prior to writing to this
mailbox. You do not need to set this variable, since it
already points to the standard system mailbox.
LOGFILE This file will also contain any error or diagnostic mes
sages from procmail (normally none :-) or any other pro
grams started by procmail. If this file is not specified,
any diagnostics or error messages will be mailed back to
the sender. See also LOGABSTRACT.
VERBOSE You can turn on extended diagnostics by setting this vari
able to yes or on, to turn it off again set it to no
or off.
LOGABSTRACT Just before procmail exits it logs an abstract of the
delivered message in $LOGFILE showing the From and Sub
ject: fields of the header, what folder it finally went to
and how long (in bytes) the message was. By setting this
variable to no, generation of this abstract is sup
pressed. If you set it to all, procmail will log an
abstract for every successful delivering recipe it pro
cesses.
LOG Anything assigned to this variable will be appended to
$LOGFILE.
ORGMAIL Usually the system mailbox (ORiGinal MAILbox). If, for
some obscure reason (like filesystem full) the mail could
not be delivered, then this mailbox will be the last
resort. If procmail fails to save the mail in here (deep,
deep trouble :-), then the mail will bounce back to the
sender.
LOCKFILE Global semaphore file. If this file already exists, proc
mail will wait until it has gone before proceeding, and
will create it itself (cleaning it up when ready, of
course). If more than one lockfile are specified, then the
previous one will be removed before trying to create the
new one. The use of a global lockfile is discouraged,
whenever possible use locallockfiles (on a per recipe
basis) instead.
LOCKEXT Default extension that is appended to a destination file to
determine what local lockfile to use (only if turned on, on
a per-recipe basis).
LOCKSLEEP Number of seconds procmail will sleep before retrying on a
lockfile (if it already existed); if not specified, it
defaults to 8 seconds.
LOCKTIMEOUT Number of seconds that have to have passed since a lockfile
was last modified/created before procmail decides that this
must be an erroneously leftover lockfile that can be
removed by force now. If zero, then no timeout will be
used and procmail will wait forever until the lockfile is
removed; if not specified, it defaults to 1024 seconds.
This variable is useful to prevent indefinite hangups of
sendmail/procmail. Procmail is immune to clock skew across
machines.
TIMEOUT Number of seconds that have to have passed before procmail
decides that some child it started must be hanging. The
offending program will receive a TERMINATE signal from
procmail, and processing of the rcfile will continue. If
zero, then no timeout will be used and procmail will wait
forever until the child has terminated; if not specified,
it defaults to 960 seconds.
MSGPREFIX Filename prefix that is used when delivering to a directory
(not used when delivering to a maildir or an MH directory).
HOST If this is not the hostname of the machine, processing of
the current rcfile will immediately cease. If other rcfiles
were specified on the command line, processing will con
tinue with the next one. If all rcfiles are exhausted, the
program will terminate, but will not generate an error
(i.e., to the mailer it will seem that the mail has been
delivered).
UMASK The name says it all (if it doesnt, then forget about this
one :-). Anything assigned to UMASK is taken as an octal
number. If not specified, the umask defaults to 077. If
the umask permits o+x, all the mailboxes procmail delivers
to directly will receive an o+x mode change. This can be
used to check if new mail arrived.
SHELLMETAS If any of the characters in SHELLMETAS appears in the line
specifying a filter or program, the line will be fed to
$SHELL instead of being executed directly.
SHELLFLAGS Any invocation of $SHELL will be like:
"$SHELL" "$SHELLFLAGS" "$*";
SENDMAIL If youre not using the forwarding facility dont worry
about this one. It specifies the program being called to
forward any mail.
It gets invoked as: "$SENDMAIL" $SENDMAILFLAGS "$@";
NORESRETRY Number of retries that are to be made if any process table
full, file table full, out of memory or out of swap
space error should occur. If this number is negative,
then procmail will retry indefinitely; if not specified, it
defaults to 4 times. The retries occur with a $SUSPEND
second interval. The idea behind this is that if, e.g.,
the swap space has been exhausted or the process table is
full, usually several other programs will either detect
this as well and abort or crash 8-), thereby freeing valu
able resources for procmail.
SUSPEND Number of seconds that procmail will pause if it has to
wait for something that is currently unavailable (memory,
fork, etc.); if not specified, it will default to 16 sec
onds. See also: LOCKSLEEP.
LINEBUF Length of the internal line buffers, cannot be set smaller
than 128. All lines read from the rcfile should not exceed
$LINEBUF characters before and after expansion. If not
specified, it defaults to 2048. This limit, of course,
does not apply to the mail itself, which can have arbitrary
line lengths, or could be a binary file for that matter.
See also PROCMAIL_OVERFLOW.
DELIVERED If set to yes procmail will pretend (to the mail agent)
the mail has been delivered. If mail cannot be delivered
after having met this assignment (set to yes), the mail
will be lost (i.e., it will not bounce).
TRAP When procmail terminates of its own accord and not because
it received a signal, it will execute the contents of this
variable. A copy of the mail can be read from stdin. Any
output produced by this command will be appended to $LOG
FILE. Possible uses for TRAP are: removal of temporary
files, logging customised abstracts, etc. See also EXIT
CODE and LOGABSTRACT.
EXITCODE By default, procmail returns an exitcode of zero (success)
if it successfully delivered the message or if the HOST
variable was misset and there were no more rcfiles on the
command line; otherwise it returns failure. Before doing
so, procmail examines the value of this variable. If it is
set to a positive numeric value, procmail will instead use
that value as its exitcode. If this variable is set but
empty and TRAP is set, procmail will set the exitcode to
whatever the TRAP program returns. If this variable is not
set, procmail will set it shortly before calling up the
TRAP program.
LASTFOLDER This variable is assigned to by procmail whenever it is
delivering to a folder or program. It always contains the
name of the last file (or program) procmail delivered to.
If the last delivery was to several directory folders
together then $LASTFOLDER will contain the hardlinked file
names as a space separated list.
MATCH This variable is assigned to by procmail whenever it is
told to extract text from a matching regular expression.
It will contain all text matching the regular expression
past the \/ token.
SHIFT Assigning a positive value to this variable has the same
effect as the shift command in sh(1). This command is
most useful to extract extra arguments passed to procmail
when acting as a generic mailfilter.
INCLUDERC Names an rcfile (relative to the current directory) which
will be included here as if it were part of the current
rcfile. Nesting is permitted and only limited by systems
resources (memory and file descriptors). As no checking is
done on the permissions or ownership of the rcfile, users
of INCLUDERC should make sure that only trusted users have
write access to the included rcfile or the directory it is
in. Command line assignments to INCLUDERC have no effect.
SWITCHRC Names an rcfile (relative to the current directory) to
which processing will be switched. If the named rcfile
doesnt exist or is not a normal file or /dev/null then an
error will be logged and processing will continue in the
current rcfile. Otherwise, processing of the current
rcfile will be aborted and the named rcfile started.
Unsetting SWITCHRC aborts processing of the current rcfile
as if it had ended at the assignment. As with INCLUDERC,
no checking is done on the permissions or ownership of the
rcfile and command line assignments have no effect.
PROCMAIL_VERSION
The version number of the running procmail binary.
PROCMAIL_OVERFLOW
This variable will be set to a non-empty value if procmail
detects a buffer overflow. See the BUGS section below for
other details of operation when overflow occurs.
COMSAT Comsat(8)/biff(1) notification is on by default, it can be
turned off by setting this variable to no. Alternatively
the biff-service can be customised by setting it to either
service@, @hostname, or service@hostname. When not
specified it defaults to biff@localhost.
DROPPRIVS If set to yes procmail will drop all privileges it might
have had (suid or sgid). This is only useful if you want
to guarantee that the bottom half of the /etc/procmailrc
file is executed on behalf of the recipient.
Extended regular expressions
The following tokens are known to both the procmail internal egrep and
the standard egrep(1) (beware that some egrep implementations include
other non-standard extensions):
^ Start of a line.
$ End of a line.
. Any character except a newline.
a* Any sequence of zero or more as.
a+ Any sequence of one or more as.
a? Either zero or one a.
[^-a-d] Any character which is not either a dash, a, b, c, d or new
line.
de|abc Either the sequence de or abc.
(abc)* Zero or more times the sequence abc.
\. Matches a single dot; use \ to quote any of the magic charac
ters to get rid of their special meaning. See also $\ vari
able substitution.
These were only samples, of course, any more complex combination is
valid as well.
The following token meanings are special procmail extensions:
^ or $ Match a newline (for multiline matches).
^^ Anchor the expression at the very start of the search area,
or if encountered at the end of the expression, anchor it at
the very end of the search area.
\< or \> Match the character before or after a word. They are merely
a shorthand for [^a-zA-Z0-9_], but can also match newlines.
Since they match actual characters, they are only suitable to
delimit words, not to delimit inter-word space.
\/ Splits the expression in two parts. Everything matching the
right part will be assigned to the MATCH environment vari
able.
EXAMPLES
Look in the procmailex(5) man page.
CAVEATS
Continued lines in an action line that specifies a program always have
to end in a backslash, even if the underlying shell would not need or
want the backslash to indicate continuation. This is due to the two
pass parsing process needed (first procmail, then the shell (or not,
depending on SHELLMETAS)).
Dont put comments on the regular expression condition lines in a
recipe, these lines are fed to the internal egrep literally (except for
continuation backslashes at the end of a line).
Leading whitespace on continued regular expression condition lines is
usually ignored (so that they can be indented), but not on continued
condition lines that are evaluated according to the sh(1) substitution
rules inside double quotes.
Watch out for deadlocks when doing unhealthy things like forwarding
mail to your own account. Deadlocks can be broken by proper use of
LOCKTIMEOUT.
Any default values that procmail has for some environment variables
will always override the ones that were already defined. If you really
want to override the defaults, you either have to put them in the
rcfile or on the command line as arguments.
The /etc/procmailrc file cannot change the PATH setting seen by user
rcfiles as the value is reset when procmail finishes the /etc/proc
mailrc file. While future enhancements are expected in this area,
recompiling procmail with the desired value is currently the only cor
rect solution.
Environment variables set inside the shell-interpreted-| action part
of a recipe will not retain their value after the recipe has finished
since they are set in a subshell of procmail. To make sure the value
of an environment variable is retained you have to put the assignment
to the variable before the leading | of a recipe, so that it can cap
ture stdout of the program.
If you specify only a h or a b flag on a delivering recipe, and the
recipe matches, then, unless the c flag is present as well, the body
respectively the header of the mail will be silently lost.
SEE ALSO
procmail(1), procmailsc(5), procmailex(5), sh(1), csh(1), mail(1),
mailx(1), uucp(1), aliases(5), sendmail(8), egrep(1), regexp(5),
grep(1), biff(1), comsat(8), lockfile(1), formail(1)
BUGS
The only substitutions of environment variables that can be handled by
procmail itself are of the type $name, ${name}, ${name:-text},
${name:+text}, ${name-text}, ${name+text}, $\name, $#, $n, $$, $?, $_,
$- and $=; whereby $\name will be substituted by the all-magic-regular-
expression-characters-disarmed equivalent of $name, $_ by the name of
the current rcfile, $- by $LASTFOLDER and $= will contain the score of
the last recipe. Furthermore, the result of $\name substitution will
never be split on whitespace. When the -a or -m options are used, $#
will expand to the number of arguments so specified and "$@" (the
quotes are required) will expand to the specified arguments. However,
"$@" will only be expanded when used in the argument list to a program,
and then only one such occurrence will be expanded.
Unquoted variable expansions performed by procmail are always split on
space, tab, and newline characters; the IFS variable is not used inter
nally.
Procmail does not support the expansion of ~.
A line buffer of length $LINEBUF is used when processing the rcfile,
any expansions that dont fit within this limit will be truncated and
PROCMAIL_OVERFLOW will be set. If the overflowing line is a condition
or an action line, then it will be considered failed and procmail will
continue processing. If it is a variable assignment or recipe start
line then procmail will abort the entire rcfile.
If the global lockfile has a relative path, and the current directory
is not the same as when the global lockfile was created, then the glob
al lockfile will not be removed if procmail exits at that point (reme
dy: use absolute paths to specify global lockfiles).
If an rcfile has a relative path and when the rcfile is first opened
MAILDIR contains a relative path, and if at one point procmail is in
structed to clone itself and the current directory has changed since
the rcfile was opened, then procmail will not be able to clone itself
(remedy: use an absolute path to reference the rcfile or make sure
MAILDIR contains an absolute path as the rcfile is opened).
A locallockfile on the recipe that marks the start of a non-forking
nested block does not work as expected.
When capturing stdout from a recipe into an environment variable, ex
actly one trailing newline will be stripped.
Some non-optimal and non-obvious regexps set MATCH to an incorrect val
ue. The regexp can be made to work by removing one or more unneeded
*, +, or ? operator on the left-hand side of the \/ token.
MISCELLANEOUS
If the regular expression contains ^TO_ it will be substituted by
(^((Original-)?(Resent-)?(To|Cc|Bcc)|(X-Envelope
|Apparently(-Resent)?)-To):(.*[^-a-zA-Z0-9_.])?), which should catch
all destination specifications containing a specific address.
If the regular expression contains ^TO it will be substituted by
(^((Original-)?(Resent-)?(To|Cc|Bcc)|(X-Envelope
|Apparently(-Resent)?)-To):(.*[^a-zA-Z])?), which should catch all
destination specifications containing a specific word.
If the regular expression contains ^FROM_DAEMON it will be substitut
ed by (^(Mailing-List:|Precedence:.*(junk|bulk|list)|To: Multiple
recipients of |(((Resent-)?(From|Sender)|X-Envelope-From):|>?From
)([^>]*[^(.%@a-z0-9])?(Post(ma?(st(e?r)?|n)|office)|(send)?Mail(er)?
|daemon|m(mdf|ajordomo)|n?uucp|LIST(SERV|proc)|NETSERV|o(wner|ps)
|r(e(quest|sponse)|oot)|b(ounce|bs\.smtp)|echo|mirror|s(erv(ices?|er)
|mtp(error)?|ystem)|A(dmin(istrator)?|MMGR|utoanswer))(([^).!:a-
z0-9][-_a-z0-9]*)?[%@>\t ][^<)]*(\(.*\).*)?)?$([^>]|$))), which should
catch mails coming from most daemons (hows that for a regular
expression :-).
If the regular expression contains ^FROM_MAILER it will be substitut
ed by (^(((Resent-)?(From|Sender)|X-Envelope-From):|>?From
)([^>]*[^(.%@a-z0-9])?(Post(ma(st(er)?|n)|office)|(send)?Mail(er)?
|daemon|mmdf|n?uucp|ops|r(esponse|oot)|(bbs\.)?smtp(error)?|s(erv(ices?
|er)|ystem)|A(dmin(istrator)?|MMGR))(([^).!:a-z0-9][-_a-z0-9]*)?[%@>\t
][^<)]*(\(.*\).*)?)?$([^>]|$)) (a stripped down version of
^FROM_DAEMON), which should catch mails coming from most mailer-
daemons.
When assigning boolean values to variables like VERBOSE, DELIVERED or
COMSAT, procmail accepts as true every string starting with: a non-zero
value, on, y, t or e. False is every string starting with: a
zero value, off, n, f or d.
If the action line of a recipe specifies a program, a sole backslash-
newline pair in it on an otherwise empty line will be converted into a
newline.
The regular expression engine built into procmail does not support
named character classes.
NOTES
Since unquoted leading whitespace is generally ignored in the rcfile
you can indent everything to taste.
The leading | on the action line to specify a program or filter is
stripped before checking for $SHELLMETAS.
Files included with the INCLUDERC directive containing only environment
variable assignments can be shared with sh.
The current behavior of assignments on the command line to INCLUDERC
and SWITCHRC is not guaranteed, has been changed once already, and may
be changed again or removed in future releases.
For really complicated processing you can even consider calling proc
mail recursively.
In the old days, the :0 that marks the beginning of a recipe, had to
be changed to :n, whereby n denotes the number of conditions that
follow.
AUTHORS
Stephen R. van den Berg
Philip A. Guenther
BuGless 2001/08/04 PROCMAILRC(5)
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