Subject: Comprehensive mail logging system

From: [email-masked] (Matthew S. 'Opie' Warren)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1993 17:14:13 -0400

Hi.

I send and receive a lot of mail, and I want to keep copies of most of it. 
Right now, I have a long series of explicit procmail recipes to handle mail
to and from various people, along the following lines:

Suppose I have a friend Eric, who has accounts [email-masked] and
[email-masked].  I have recipes like this:

:2c:eric-storage.lock
^From.*(smith-eric|eric_smith)
!^X-Eric: logged
eric/$DATE

     :A
     | formail -i "X-Eric: logged" | procmail

:3c:eric-storage.lock
^From.*(warren|opie|msw)
^To:.*(smith-eric|eric_smith)
!^X-Eric: logged
eric/$DATE
 
     :A
     | formail -i "X-Eric: logged" | procmail

Then I repeat the messages for all the other people I want to log mail
from.  I run everything back through procmail in case I address a letter to
six people; in this case, I want it to be logged in each of their
mailboxes.

This is a good system, but it's a kludge from hell.  The problems include:
(a) I have to do all that explicit recipe stuff for each person, (b) I get
headers like:

X-Eric: logged
X-Amy: logged
X-John: logged
X-Koko: logged

And so forth.  

WHAT I REALLY WANT is a system that depends on a text file, delimited so
that the first field is the name of the directory, and the others are the
things to grep for:

eric     eric_smith     smith-eric
amy      amy_smith      smith-amy

or, alternatively, something like:

eric     (eric_smith|smith-eric)
amy      (amy_smith|smith-amy)

And something that would log it for all the people and indicate as such
with a single header line:

X-Logged: Eric, Amy

Does anyone have anything remotely like this, or any suggestions?  My shell
programming, such as it is, isn't up to my doing this as far as I can tell,
unless someone can suggest a serious shortcut.

Thanks a lot.

Matt

-- 
Matthew S. "Opie" Warren   [email-masked]   [email-masked]
"It wouldn't have been anything, even if it were gonna be a thing."