Procmail

This document demonstrates how to use procmail to automate mail handling. General mail handling based on the subject line is discussed first to get you familiar with procmail. Handling multiple mailboxes is discussed at the end of this document.

Assume we get three types of mail:

1. Information requests (generated by a web form) with the subject line: INFO REQUEST
2. Orders (generated by a web form) with the subject line: ORDER
3. Support requests (generated by a web form) with the subject line: SUPPORT REQUEST

We want all three of these treated differently.

'INFO REQUEST' needs to be saved into a folder called 'Marketing'. This is the most basic type of filtering.

'ORDER' needs to be saved in a folder called 'Sales' and a copy needs to be sent to 'joe' (joe@bigbusiness.com)$

'SUPPORT' needs to be saved to a folder called 'Support', a copy mailed to the support team (support@bigbusiness.com) and an acknowledgment sent back to the person who send the mail. This is a custom autoresponder.

SSH to the server. Using pico (newer customers use nano) create '.procmailrc' in your home directory. In the '.procmailrc' file, you are going to put the following text which sets some environment variables:

PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin                # Path Variables for the procmail session
MAILDIR=/var/spool/mail/yourdomain.com      # Don't put 'www.' in front of your domain here
LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail.log                  # Keeps a log of email routing
VERBOSE=no                                  # Verbose Error Reporting --values (no|off yes|on)
COMSAT=no                                   # set to no|off
# SENDMAIL=/usr/bin/sendmail                # sendmail location (comment in procmail only) 

Adding the following text will match everything with 'INFO REQUEST' in the Subject line and save it to the folder 'Marketing'.

:0
* ^Subject:.*INFO REQUEST
Marketing

Adding the following text will match everything with 'ORDER' in the subject line and save it to the folder Sales' and then send it to joe@bigbusiness.com.

:0
* ^Subject:.*ORDER
{  
  :0 c
  ! joe@bigbusiness.com
  :0
  Sales
}

Adding the text below will match everything with 'SUPPORT' in the Subject line and save it to the folder 'Support', then send it to support@bigbusiness.com and return an acknowledgment to the user who sent the support request.

This is a little more difficult to understand. Make sure that 'SUPPORT' is in the Subject line and that it does not contain data from 'FROM_DAEMON' (listserv's and auto-mailers are suppose to put this in their headers.)

We also don't want to keep replying to other auto responders. This is remedied by putting an 'X' header on your response. (X headers are not seen by standard mail clients) formail reformats the headers of the outgoing message to include 'X-Loop: john_doe@bigbusiness.com' The text that is being displayed is in the file '/home/your_account/acknowledgement.txt' It's mailed to support@bigbusiness.com and saved to the 'Support' folder.

:0
* ^Subject:.*SUPPORT
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: john_doe@bigbusiness.com
  {
   :0 h c
     | (formail -t -r -A"X-Loop: john_doe@bigbusines.com " ; \
     cat /home/your_account/acknowlegement.txt ) | $SENDMAIL -t
   :0 c
     !support@bigbusiness.com
   :0
     Support
  }

To separate mail by sender (From line) use the following text which will cause any mail from joe@bigbusiness.com to be stored in the folder 'BigBoss'.

:0
* ^From:.*joe@bigbusiness.com
BigBoss

To cause a rule to be applied only to specific mailbox you simply add another line to the rule which requires the To: line to match. Note that in the presence of multiple mailboxes all rules are checked, so this means that a rule that doesn't check who an email is to will be applied to all incoming email.

Here is a simple email forwarding rule:

:0
* ^TO_somethinglocal@myHurricaneElectricHostedDomain.com
! my_personal_address@someOtherDomain.net

Note: this forwards all mail, including spam. Please install SpamAssassin at the top of your .procmailrc file to limit the amount of spam your destination mailbox receives.

The following text will cause any mail sent to register@yourvirtualhost.com to be stored in the folder 'Registrations'.

:0
* ^TO_register@yourvirtualhost.com
Registrations

To modify the autoresponder rule used above to respond to mail sent to support the follow would be used.

:0
* ^TO_support@yourvirtualhost.com
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: john_doe@bigbusiness.com
# The rest of the rule follows below

To modify the autoresponder rule used above to respond to mail sent to support the follow would be used.

:0
* ^TO_support@yourvirtualhost.com
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: john_doe@bigbusiness.com
# The rest of the rule follows below