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Mail Filtering, Vacation message

Procmail is mail filtering software that can pre-process your emails according to the rules you specify. For example, if you subscribe to several mailing lists, procmail can put then into their own mailboxes so that they do not interfere with your important emails in the inbox. Procmail can also be used to modify, forward, delete (stop spam) or backup your emails. Since it uses standard Unix regular expressions and Unix commands, the filtering rules and actions are extremely flexible.

To set up procmail, you need to first edit a .procmail file. The Helpdesk dot file repository http://www.stat.rice.edu/ helpdesk/dotfiles has a sample .procmail file that you can copy and use. Although this file is well-commented, you would better learn some basics from spambouncer.org http://www.spambouncer.org/proctut.shtml or other online procmail tutorials. Another tutorial http://www.umbi.umd.edu/computing/procmail.html focus more on regular expressions.

After you modify and put .procmailrc under your home directory, create a file named .forward with the following line:

"|IFS=" " && exec /usr/local/bin/procmail"
and your incoming emails will be filtered as you requested.

If you are away on vacation and will not be able to return emails in time, it is customary to reply each incoming email with a ``vacation message''. This can be done by typing command

vacation
in command line. Anyway, procmail is safer and more flexible to do this especially when you receive many emails from mailing lists4.2. An example can be found from procmail sample rc: siteman procmailex


next up previous contents index
Next: Web Browsers and Homepages Up: Email Previous: Webmail   Contents   Index
Statistics Helpdesk 2004-08-17