Subject: Re: Autoresponders

From: [email-masked] (Erik Dufek x5-8264)
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 94 21:20:36 +0200

Jim,

I'm neither a wizard nor a programmer, but over the last two weeks
since procmail was made available here, I've been steadily learning the
in's and out's.  Even though you have a response to your specific
question, I have a way for you to troubleshoot future problems.  One
intensive way to troubleshoot gross problems is to use the line
"VERBOSE=ON"  You will get a very complete listing of every command
executed.  You don't want to do this for too long if you have a lot of
incoming mail or many rules because you'll quickly run out of quota
space.

Another trick I found very handy in troubleshooting was to use a
duplicate set of rules.  One would be just like yours (just in case it
worked correctly).  The second one would be *exactly* the same except
instead of the pipe, I use the redirection symbol and a filename.

       ie  ... Received at `date`") >> testing.file

Now the script will (hopefully) respond as expected, but if it doesn't,
you will have a mirror image in 'testing.file' to see what went wrong.
I spent a lot of time sending email across a gateway until I kicked
myself for not using redirection.  It's definitely a quicker response
then waiting for a mailer's reaction.

erik
---
[email-masked]

> Jim Buck wrote:
> >:0 hc
> >* ^From.*(JH4144,JRB001,BUCKSAC,rich_buck,buck2,talin,jeffo,Jeff.Oberlander)*
> >| (formail -r -A"Precedence: junk" -A"User-Mailer: Autoresponder";\
> >   echo "Email Received at `date`") | $SENDMAIL -t
> 
> >Unfortunately, the above rule matches Every Sender - arggh!  Even mailing
> >lists were matched, according to my log.  I hope that I haven't auto-
> >responded everybody to death.  Could you assist with a rule that just
> >matches the senders listed in the parenthesis?