procmail

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procmail
Design by	Stephen R. van den Berg
Developed by	Philip A. Guenther
Initial release	December 7, 1990
Latest release	3.22 / September 10, 2001
OS	Any Unix-like
Platform	Cross-platform
Genre	Mail filter
License	GPL or Artistic License
Website	http://www.procmail.org/

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Procmail is a mail delivery agent (MDA) or mail filter, a program to process incoming emails on a computer, widely used on Unix systems. It is typically invoked from a mail transfer agent (MTA) like Sendmail; this makes the mail processing event-driven. The companion-tool formail allows procmail to be used in batch-processing on mail that already is in your mailbox.

Common operations carried out with procmail include filtering and sorting of emails into different folders according to keywords in from, to, subject, text of the mail, or sending autoreplies, but more sophisticated operations are also possible.

A common practice is to let procmail call an external spam filter program, such as SpamAssassin. This method can allow for spam to be filtered or even deleted.

[edit] Examples

DROPPRIVS=yes
DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/
MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/

# Pass mail through spamc, the interface to SpamAssassin

:0fw
| /usr/bin/spamc

# Move mail marked as spam to a mailbox named '.Trash/'

:0
* ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*
.Trash/

:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
.Trash/