Procmail: Forwarding just does not work

j-epp · 03-13-2011, 05:50 AM

Hi,
I've spent pretty much the whole night trying to figure out how I can achieve the following:
If a certain Keyword, say [key], is in the subject line, then the email is forwarded to a list of people.

My recipe (now) looks like this:

Code:

:0
* ^Subject: .*\[key\].*
! my-email@gmail.com

The (verbose) procmail logfile gives me this:

Code:

procmail: [16756] Sun Mar 13 03:20:30 2011
procmail: Assigning "MAILDIR=/fs/home1/student/j/USER/Mailfolder"
procmail: Assigning "DEFAULT=/fs/home1/student/j/USER/Mailfolder/IN-unmatched"
procmail: Assigning "INCLUDERC=/fs/home1/student/j/USER/Procmail/rc.forwarding"
procmail: Match on "^Subject: .*\[key\].*"
procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER=/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi my-email@gmail.com"
procmail: Executing "/usr/sbin/sendmail,-oi,my-email@gmail.com"
procmail: Notified comsat: "USER@:/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi my-email@gmail.com"
From some-email@gmail.com Sun Mar 13 03:20:30 2011
 Subject: Fwd: [key] bla
  Folder: /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi my-email@gmail.com                   3474

Now, that does look like it actually worked, right? Well, the forwarded message never arrived at my-email@gmail.com.
However, if I myself issue

Code:

echo "test"|sendmail -oi my-email@gmail.com

the message "test" arrives at my-email@gmail.com instantly.

Is my recipe wrong in any way? I pretty much copied it from available ones.
It's a university server, so I'm no admin, just a user. How can I figure out whether some setting that the admin made prevents procmail from calling sendmail or whatever?
What commands should I run to give you the info about the system you need to help me with that problem?

Thanks guys!
Jona

repo · 03-13-2011, 05:54 AM

Perhaps you can ask them?
They can look in the logfiles to see why the mail isn't sent.

Kind regards

david1941 · 03-13-2011, 06:25 AM

Try;

Code:

 :0 c
* ^Subject: .*\[key\].*
! my-email@gmail.com

j-epp · 03-13-2011, 07:55 PM

So the extra c did not help, and all the admins would answer to me is that they're not debugging procmail for me, even less so since what I'm trying to do has nothing to do with academic work. Also, I wouldn't know what to ask them for, if I had to say "please include command xyz in smrsh" or something like that, I would, but as it stands I don't even know what's wrong.

That said, I still figured it out. I had a .forward file with these 2 lines:

Code:

\USER
"|/usr/bin/procmail"

The first one just forwards everything to my mailbox, the 2nd one pipes it to procmail. I reversed the order, and surprise, it works now with this .forward file:

Code:

"|/usr/bin/procmail"
\USER

Why, I don't know, the incoming messages obviously got piped to procmail with the 1st version, too. Maybe someone can explain that?

Best