OT: Procmail help

[Nick Simicich]

At 01:14 PM 2003-02-06 -0800, Peter Loron wrote:

>Sorry for the OT post.
>
>I'd like to create (or borrow) a Procmail recipe that will add a bit of 
>text to the beginning of certain Subject headers. Specifically, I get some 
>mailinglists that prefix their messages with something like "[listname]", 
>and some that don't. I want to add those prefixes.
>
>I did some looking in Google, but either got back waaaaay too many hits or 
>nothing, depending on my keywords.
>
>Can somebody point me to a recipe? I know this wheel has been invented 
>before...

If you do not understand procmail well enough to write recipes easily, may 
I suggest a more radical solution? There is a mail filter program called 
"maildrop".  It uses a vaguely C like language to do the things that 
procmail does.  I got to the point that I could not understand my recipes 
pretty quickly.  I installed maildrop, and I was much happier.

xfilter replaces the contents of the message with the output of the 
command.  reformail is a command that comes with maildrop and allows you to 
alter headers.  Headers are already folded conceptually to one line.

I simplifed this a lot, I use it with about 20 lists (and I do not use it 
to add subject tags, I use it to optionally run the lists through demime to 
remove html and to add reply-to.   I run bogofilter from maildrop as well, 
strip out broken PGP signatures (and change multipart/signed to 
multipart/mixed, and application/pgp to text/plain).

and so forth.

As you can see, adding something like removing a 
Disposition-notification-to headers is actually straightforward, and, in my 
opinion, readable.  They do a couple different things with regular 
expressions. For example, ! is used to separate the match into sections, 
and the \ for continuations, and the grouping with the isolated { } are in 
the syntax, to simplify the parser.  But all this is not as weird as 
procmail, and it can be understood.  And it fails safe - if you make a 
syntax error, it returns TEMPFAIL so that you do not lose mail.

I consider this to be related to bogofilter because many people will drive 
bogofilter out of maildrop or procmail.

I use -u on bogofilter - then I apply whitelists and overrides (this is 
spam even when bogofilter says it is not, for example, when there are three 
postmasters mentioned in the headers) and then run bogofilter -S or -N if 
the spam is reclassified.  I am not sure I *could* do this from 
procmail.  But it was no harder than writing the pseudo C code to handle 
the logic (a couple of state variables, some tests, an if) to handle this 
in maildrop. And all this stuff just works.


if (    /^Sender:.*!bogofilter!.*@!aotto\.com/ || \
         /^Sender:.*!courier-maildrop!-admin@!lists\.sourceforge\.net/ || \
         /^Sender: !discuss!.*@!mandrakesecure\.net/)
{
         ltalk=$MATCH2
         domain=$MATCH4
         if ( (! /^Subject:.*\[$ltalk\]/) && 
/^Subject:[:space:]*!.*[^:space:]![:space:]*$/)
                    xfilter "/usr/local/bin/reformail -I'Subject: [$ltalk] 
$MATCH2'"
         }
         if ( /^content-type:[:space:].*html/ || \
              /^content-type:[:space:].*multi/ || \
              /^content-type:[:space:].*rich/  || \
              /^content-type:[:space:].*application/  || \
              /^X-MS-Attachment/ || \
              /^[:space:]+winmail[0-9]?.dat/:b || \
              /\*This message was transferred with a trial version of 
CommuniGate
\(tm\) Pro\*/:b || \
              /^begin[:space:]+[:digit:]+[:space:]+winmail.dat/:b || \
              /^begin\s+[0-7]+[:space:]+[:graph:]+[:space:]*$/:b)
         {
                 log "$ltalk@$domain message demimed: $MATCH"
                 xfilter $DEMIMEFILTER
         }
         if ( ! /^Reply-to:/)
         {
                 log "$ltalk@$domain message having Reply-To: 
$ltalk@$domain added."
                 xfilter "/usr/local/bin/reformail -A'Reply-To: 
$ltalk@$domain'"
         }
         if (/^Disposition-Notification-To:/)
         {
                 log "$ltalk@$domain message having 
Disposition-Notification-To: removed."
                 xfilter "/usr/local/bin/reformail 
-I'Disposition-Notification-To:\'"
         }
}

See: http://www.flounder.net/~mrsam/maildrop/README.html


>Thanks.
>
>-Pete
>
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>FAQ: http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/bogofilter-faq.html
>To unsubscribe, e-mail: bogofilter-unsubscribe at aotto.com
>For summary digest subscription: bogofilter-digest-subscribe at aotto.com
>For more commands, e-mail: bogofilter-help at aotto.com
>
>
>

--
SPAM: Trademark for spiced, chopped ham manufactured by Hormel.
spam: Unsolicited, Bulk E-mail, where e-mail can be interpreted generally 
to mean electronic messages designed to be read by an individual, and it 
can include Usenet, SMS, AIM, etc.  But if it is not all three of 
Unsolicited, Bulk, and E-mail, it simply is not spam. Misusing the term 
plays into the hands of the spammers, since it causes confusion, and 
spammers thrive on  confusion. Spam is not speech, it is an action, like 
theft, or vandalism. If you were not confused, would you patronize a spammer?
Nick Simicich - njs at scifi.squawk.com - http://scifi.squawk.com/njs.html
Stop by and light up the world!