On Thursday 29 November 2001 11:22 am, Dave Sherohman wrote: > That's something I've wondered about for a while... I've found > exim's .forward filtering to be more than adequate for anything I've > ever wanted to do (and a lot more human-readable to boot), but you > seem to be implying that it's less capable than procmail. What can > procmail do that exim can't?
I meant "cruel" in the sense that exim's filtering syntax is Shakespeare compared to procmail's butchery. I'm not sure I understand all the differences between exim and procmail filtering, but here's my limited understanding: * exim allows you to filter without changing the envelope sender -- not sure if procmail can do this. * exim filtering is better at detecting (and preventing) duplicate messages among multiple users * procmail can pipe messages to other programs and use the return code to do futher filtering. Exim can pipe to external programs as well, but can't (AFAIK) use the return code in any way. Basically, exim is set up to deliver messages, so its filtering is designed with message delivery as the ultimate goal. Procmail is more of a swiss army knife and has a bit more flexibility. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive -- one can augment the other. BTW, I highly recommend the O'Reilly exim book if you're at all interested in learning more about exim. I use it most/all of the time when I have exim questions. hth --kurt
