Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Configuring procmail

Let’s see...two messages from the boss...17 messages from the string collector’s discussion group...oh, hey, a message from mom...and....

One of the handiest things you can do to make your Unix life easier is to use procmail (a mail-filtering program) to automatically handle some of your incoming email.

In this section, we’ll show you how to configure procmail so you can manage incoming messages. As Figures 11.16 and 11.17 show, you need to do two things to set up your system to manage mail with procmail:

• Specify settings for procmail (Figure 11.16). For example, incoming mail normally gets plunked directly into your in-box; however, procmail filters mail before it even gets to your in-box, so you need to tell procmail