Subject: Re: Procmail skips some mails

From: Chris Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 16:57:39 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 27 Feb 1995, Kevin Yeung wrote:
> I'm using procmail and it works fine most of the time.  However, 
> sometimes, messages from mailing lists go to INBOX instead of my mailbox 
> for mailing lists.  This only happens every now and then.  I know cases 
> are significant in the rcfile, but addresses of mailing lists are 
> constant.  Also, I tried to bounce 1 wrongly filed message to another 
> a/c, then bounce it back and it was filed correctly.  Anyone can offer me 
> some help?  Thank you very much.

When this happens to me, it seems to correspond to downtime on one of 
several servers. I suspect that the machine processing mails is up and 
running, but that the machine holding user areas is unavailable, and mail 
ends up getting delivered into the INBOX (which is usually NOT in the 
user area). In other words, not much that you can do about in .procmailrc

As I understand it, there is a way to use procmail as the mail delivery 
agent on the system to ensure that this doesn't happen, but it requires 
more procmail understanding than I currently have.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Chris Smith                                              <[email-masked]>
             "On the Internet, no one knows you're Canadian."

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From: [email-masked] (David W. Tamkin)
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 16:11:01 -0600 (CST)

Kevin Yeung asked,

| [S]ometimes, messages from mailing lists go to INBOX instead of my mailbox 
| for mailing lists.  ...  Also, I tried to bounce 1 wrongly filed message to
| another a/c, then bounce it back and it was filed correctly.

Since you got two different results on two tries with a single letter, it
sounds as though procmail tried to file those messages correctly but couldn't
for some transient reason (full filesystem, broken symlink, broken cross-
mount, timeout waiting for a lock, or temporarily broken permissions, for
some examples) and, rather than dumping the messages into the bit bucket,
returned to your rcfile and kept reading recipes farther along in it.  Even-
tually it found one that said to put them into your inbox or it reached the
end of your rcfile and stored them there by default.

Are you using a logfile?  You should; it will give procmail a place to record
errors and problems so that you can see what's going on.  Given that this
particular recipe has problems, you should turn verbose logging on just
before it and turn it off just after that recipe.

| I know cases are significant in the rcfile, but addresses of mailing lists
| are constant.

Case is *insignificant* unless you have the `D' flag on a recipe.  Even then,
matches to compiled-in tokens like ^TO, ^FROM_DAEMON, and ^FROM_MAILER are
still case-insensitive.

David W. Tamkin  Box 3284  Skokie, Illinois  60076-6284
[email-masked]    MCI Mail: 426-1818   +1 312 714 5610