For installation instructions see the INSTALL file. ---------------------- Procmail & formail mail processing package. Copyright (c) 1990-1994, S.R. van den Berg, The Netherlands. Some legal stuff: Use this software package at your own risk. The programmer cannot be held liable for any incurred damages, directly or indirectly due to the use or inability to use this software. You are encouraged to distribute this package freely. This package is however not to be sold (minor transfer costs excepted) or included in any commercially sold software package (if you want to do this anyway, contact me (address below), and we'll work something out). If you distribute it, please leave the package intact. You are allowed to take parts from this distribution and distribute these separately as long as you retain the copyright messages. If you redistribute any part of this package in a modified form, be sure to mark the parts you changed. If you have some important changes that might be useful to the rest of the world, contact me instead. -------------------------- SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS ------------------------------- Any *NIX-alike (or POSIX compliant) system. Sendmail, ZMailer, smail, MMDF, mailsurr or compatible mailers (in effect any mailer that can process RFC-822 compliant mails). For a fairly complete list of all C-library references done in the programs see "src/includes.h". ------------------------------ DESCRIPTION ----------------------------------- The procmail mail processing program. (v3.10pre2 1994/09/14) 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. Procmail can be used: - and installed by an unprivileged user (for himself only). - as a drop in replacement for the local delivery agent /bin/mail (with biff/comsat support). - as a general mailfilter for whole groups of messages (e.g. when called from within sendmail.cf rules). The accompanying formail program enables you to generate autoreplies, split up digests/mailboxes into the original messages, do some very simple header-munging/extraction, or force mail into mail-format (with leading From line). ---------------------- I made the utmost effort to make procmail as robust as any program can be (every conceivable system error is caught *and* handled). Since procmail is written entirely in C, it poses a very low impact on your system's resources (under normal conditions, when you don't start other programs/scripts from within it, it is faster and more robust than the average /bin/mail you have on your system now). Procmail was designed to deliver the mail under the worst conditions (file system full, out of swap space, process table full, file table full, missing support files, unavailable executables; it all doesn't matter). Should (in the unlikely event) procmail be unable to deliver your mail somewhere, the mail will bounce back to the sender or reenter the mailqueue (your choice). For a more extensive list of features see the FEATURES file. ---------------------- However, as with any program, bugs cannot be completely ruled out. I tested the program extensively, and believe it should be relatively bug free (no known bug at the time). Should, however, anyone find any bugs (highly unlikely :-), I would be pleased (well, sort of :-) to hear about it. Please send me the patches or bug report. I'll look at them and will try to fix it in a future release. (BTW, if you should find any spelling or grammar errors in these files, don't hesitate to point them out to me; I like correct English just as much as you do). ---------------------- I would like to take the opportunity to express my gratitude in particular to these devoted users of the procmail-package. Without their constant feedback procmail would not have looked the same: David W. Tamkin An excellent proofreader and betatester Josh Laff For stresstesting procmail (and me :-) Dan Jacobson For his many useful suggestions Rick Troxel Because I crashed his Convex way too often :-) Roman Czyborra For his enthusiastic ideas ---------------------- Please note that this program essentially is supposed to be static, that means no extra features (honouring the VNIX spirit) are supposed to be added (though any useful suggestions will be appreciated and evaluated if time permits). Cheers, Stephen R. van den Berg at RWTH-Aachen, Germany. Internet E-mail: berg@pool.informatik.rwth-aachen.de Snail-Mail: P.O.Box 21074 6369 ZG Simpelveld The Netherlands Procmail mailinglist: procmail-request@informatik.rwth-aachen.de SmartList mailinglist: SmartList-request@informatik.rwth-aachen.de ---------------------- A recent version can be picked up at various comp.sources.misc archives. The latest version can be obtained directly from the ftp-archive at: ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (137.226.225.3) as (g)zipped tar file: /pub/packages/procmail/procmail.tar.gz <160KB as compressed tar file: /pub/packages/procmail/procmail.tar.Z <224KB ----------------------