Need Procmailrc Rule

TastyWheat · 09-22-2007, 01:20 PM

I have a procmailrc file setup for my school account. It moves all external emails (i.e. emails from outside the school) to a seperate folder. I find that gets rid of almost all the spam. Some of my classmates prefer using Yahoo and Gmail so they'd get filtered out based on my current rule. I want to make a rule so their emails get put in my inbox (as an exception to the external mail rule). I can't find a rule that will accomplish this. I just want procmail to ignore those messages (treat them like normal).

slakmagik · 09-22-2007, 07:42 PM

You could just do something like (untested)

Code:

:0:
* ^From: .*\.(yahoo|gmail).com$
EXCEPTIONAL_MAILBOX

but that would probably give you back most of your spam. Something like a whitelist might be better:

Code:

# this is not a procmail standard variable
WHITELIST=$HOME/.procmailwl

:0:
* ^From:.*\/[a-z0-9_.+-]+@[a-z0-9_.-]+
* ? fgrep -qix "$MATCH" $WHITELIST
EXCEPTIONAL_MAILBOX

Just put the addesses of the people you want mail from in the whitelist, one per line or write a little script to process your mailboxes to generate the whitelist.

Some people plug in things like spamassasin to deal with spam explicitly, though.

TastyWheat · 09-27-2007, 07:33 PM

Is there something wrong with this rule?

Code:

# Send to special folder
:0
* ^From:.*friend1@gmail.com
* ^From:.*friend2@yahoo.com
* ^From:.*friend3@yahoo.com
$HOME/mail/safe-mail

I would've thought any emails from those addresses would be sent to 'safe-mail' but they're not. All messages are sent to my inbox.

This rule, however, works exactly like I would expect it to:

Code:

# Seperate email from external domain
:0
* !^From:.*myschool.edu
$HOME/mail/foreign-mail

I need to get the first rule working and I need it to work with the second rule. What am I missing?

TastyWheat · 09-27-2007, 10:00 PM

I made a very subtle mistake here. If multiple conditions are given then each condition must be true in order for the action to be taken. So this is what I actually needed to do:

Code:

# Emails from ANY of these addresses goes to a special folder
:0:
* ^From:.*friend1@gmail.com|^From:.*friend2@yahoo.com|\
  ^From:.*friend3@yahoo.com
$HOME/mail/safe-mail

I'm still not sure if the extra colon (for lockfiles) is necessary, but it doesn't hurt.