Proctut: Procmail Tutorials

The proctut series is for the absolute procmail beginner as well as the intermediate user. The series does not cover installation or configuration of procmail (this is expertly done at Nancy McGough's "Procmail Quick Start").

1. Procmail Basics (posted 22 Aug 2003, updated 16 Sep 2003)
   Procmail overview, including recipes, where recipes are stored, and how they run.
2. Anatomy of a Procmail Recipe, Part I (posted 26 Aug 2003, updated 16 Sep 2003)
   The basics of a procmail recipe, including flags, conditions, and action lines.
3. Simple Regular Expressions, Part I (posted 2 Sep 2003, updated 14 Oct 2003)
   Procmail regular expression basics, including the dot character, and quantifiers, including the question mark, asterisk, and plus sign.
4. Simple Regular Expressions, Part II (posted 8 Sep 2003, updated 23 Oct 2003)
   Procmail regular expression basics, including groups, alternation, and character classes.
5. Simple Regular Expressions, Part III (posted 15 Sep 2003, updated 16 Oct 2003)
   Procmail regular expression basics, including anchors and some examples.
6. Thinking "Regex" (posted 17 Oct 2003)
   Learning to think like a regular expression engine.
7. Anatomy of a Procmail Recipe, Part II (posted 21 Oct 2003, updated 22 Oct 2003)
   Procmail has two kinds of recipes: delivering recipes and non-delivering recipes. This tutorial describes what it means when procmail "delivers" mail.
8. Anatomy of a Procmail Recipe, Part III (posted 25 May 2004, updated 26 May 2004)
   Procmail has two kinds of recipes: delivering recipes and non-delivering recipes. This tutorial describes non-delivering recipes, including procmail's carbon copy flag, nested blocks, and variable assignments. Pipes and filters will be discussed in a future tutorial.

Proctip: Procmail Tips & Tricks

The proctip tips and tricks series is for intermediate procmail users.

1. Using the H and B variables (posted 25 Sep 2003)
   Use the H and B built-in procmail variables instead of the H and B flags when you need to scan both headers and body in the same recipe.
2. Using variables for cleaner recipes (posted 1 Oct 2003)
   Using variables (with short and descriptive names) makes procmail recipes more concise and easier to read.
3. Achieving "or" conditions in recipes (posted 9 Oct 2003)
   Sometimes we want to "or" conditions together, instead of "and" (which is procmail's default behavior). We present four different ways to "or" procmail recipe conditions to help make efficient and more readable recipes.

Getting More Help

You may receive additional help with using procmail by searching the procmail mailing list archive.

If you are unable to find answers to your questions, you may subscribe to the procmail users mailing list and ask your question there. Good netizens will lurk for a while to get a feel for what kinds of questions are appropriate and how best to ask them (tip: give as much information as you can, including the version of procmail you are using, and actual recipes you've tried to solve your problem).

Acknowledgements

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