On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 07:37:29PM -0800, Kurt Lieber wrote: > On Thursday 29 November 2001 07:05 pm, cmasters wrote: > > > Hope you don't mind the interruption. You may have noticed my slew of > > postings about difficulties with sorting mail. I read your reponse to mean > > that I may not even require the services of procmail, as I ~am~ using exim > > as my MTA. Is this correct? I just want fairly simple pre-sorting of mail > > before I read it with mutt. > > Um -- I haven't followed the other threads too closely, so I'm not intimately > familiar with your predicament. However, my recommendation is to use > fetchmail, procmail and mutt together and cut exim out of the picture. > Procmail has a nasty, ugly, horrible syntax, but it's a more flexible > filtering program than exim. Also, once you get up to speed with > fetchmail/procmail/mutt, you'll likely want to improve upon your filtering > capabilities to cull spam and other niceties. That's where you probably want > to have procmail. > Well now I'm confused yet again. All the documentation that I've read states that some sort of mail-transport-agent is required in order to send/receive mail. Sendmail was ornery in setup, so I installed exim (which in turn removed sendmail). Are you saying that I don't ~need~ a mail-transport-agent? I have several users (roommates) on this box and still need to get my syslogs sent to me - as they are now.
Please clarify. > Fetchmail can use procmail as the MDA -- just put: > > mda "procmail" > I tried that at the very beginning, but it's been established that exim is likely interrupting the flow *shaking head*. > in your .fetchmailrc file and exim should be completely removed from the > equation. > > You'll also want to modify your .procmailrc file to use formail, which will > regenerate the "From" field so you don't lose your mail. (see man procmail > for more info -- look for the -f option) > This would then rewrite the 'from' field, requiring sorting by subject contents, correct? *can't even imagine at this point* > Note: that's just my opinion on how I would do things It's worth about as > much as the e-paper this is printed on. > > > No doubt a very helpful book. Unfortunately this "capital" city on the east > > caost of Canada has just discovered that M$ is ~not~ the only OS. I'd have > > to order said book, and wait 4 - 6 weeks for delivery of it. Not sure I can > > go through another few weeks of this dilemma. > > One thing that I've learned in my time with linux is that there are always > 472 different ways of doing the exact same damn thing. I cannot tell you how > frustrating and wonderful that is, all at the same time. There is no "one > right answer" for whatever you're trying to do. > Not feeling much of the wonderful right now ... although I do remember that feeling when I removed gpm and got a fully functioning mouse *g*. > So, my advice is to pick one way that seems to make the most sense and stick > with it. Once you get more comfortable with linux, you can go back and > change things if you want. But if you keep jumping around to different > configuration options, then you'll continue to spin your wheels and never get > anything done. > > --kurt > Good advice. Off to check the 'newbie' sites that you mentioned elsewhere. Thank you again, C. Masters
