[25139] in Cypherpunks
Re: procmail: another question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James A. Donald)
Tue Jan 10 14:48:48 1995
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 1995 11:21:04 -0800 (PST)
From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@netcom.com>
To: Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>
Cc: RGRIFFITH@sfasu.edu, cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <199501101826.NAA15838@hermes.bwh.harvard.edu>
On Tue, 10 Jan 1995, Adam Shostack wrote:
> Procmail is a very versatile, relatively easy to use way of
> processing mail.
"Relatively easy" -- Relative to the usual venomous Unix
user hostile interface that is. I use procmail, but my
local Unix guru does not, even though he has a clear need to do so.
> Its most obvious function is to put mailing lists
> into one or several folders, but it also can be made into a file
> server*, automatically retrieve PGP keys, act as a basic remailer,
> etc, etc.
The .procmailrc file is in effect a program, rather than
a bunch of flags.
Every time procmail receives a message it interpretively
executes this program, which does a pattern match on the mail, if
it gets a match, passes the mail to some external program,
which may be yet another invocation of procmail executing
a different .rc file.
Now if us windows folk had done it, we would have done
it as visual basic controls and we would have created
an installation program. Still I must
confess, we windows folk have not done it and the unix folk have
done it, so I guess it is score 1 for unix, 0 for
windows.
But I guarantee the chairman of the board is not going
to use procmail.
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