For installation instructions see the INSTALL file.
----------------------
Procmail & formail mail processing package.
Copyright (c) 1990-1995, S.R. van den Berg, The Netherlands.
Some legal stuff:
Use this software package at your own risk. The programmer cannot
be held liable for any incurred damages, directly or indirectly due to
the use or inability to use this software.
You are encouraged to distribute this package freely. This package is
however not to be sold (minor transfer costs excepted) or included in
any commercially sold software package (if you want to do this anyway,
contact me (address below), and we'll work something out).
If you distribute it, please leave the package intact. You are allowed to
take parts from this distribution and distribute these separately as long
as you retain the copyright messages. If you redistribute any part of this
package in a modified form, be sure to mark the parts you changed.
If you have some important changes that might be useful to the rest of the
world, contact me instead.
-------------------------- SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS -------------------------------
Any *NIX-alike (or POSIX compliant) system.
Sendmail, ZMailer, smail, MMDF, mailsurr or compatible mailers (in effect any
mailer that can process RFC-822 compliant mails).
For a fairly complete list of all C-library references done in the programs
see "src/includes.h".
------------------------------ DESCRIPTION -----------------------------------
The procmail mail processing program. (v3.11pre4 1995/10/29)
Can be used to create mail-servers, mailing lists, sort your incoming mail
into separate folders/files (real convenient when subscribing to one or more
mailing lists or for prioritising your mail), preprocess your mail, start
any programs upon mail arrival (e.g. to generate different chimes on your
workstation for different types of mail) or selectively forward certain
incoming mail automatically to someone.
Procmail can be used:
- and installed by an unprivileged user (for himself only).
- as a drop in replacement for the local delivery agent /bin/mail
(with biff/comsat support).
- as a general mailfilter for whole groups of messages (e.g. when
called from within sendmail.cf rules).
The accompanying formail program enables you to generate autoreplies, split up
digests/mailboxes into the original messages, do some very simple
header-munging/extraction, or force mail into mail-format (with leading From
line).
----------------------
I made the utmost effort to make procmail as robust as any program can be
(every conceivable system error is caught *and* handled).
Since procmail is written entirely in C, it poses a very low impact
on your system's resources (under normal conditions, when you don't
start other programs/scripts from within it, it is faster and more
robust than the average /bin/mail you have on your system now).
Procmail was designed to deliver the mail under the worst conditions
(file system full, out of swap space, process table full, file table full,
missing support files, unavailable executables; it all doesn't matter).
Should (in the unlikely event) procmail be unable to deliver your mail
somewhere, the mail will bounce back to the sender or reenter the mailqueue
(your choice).
For a more extensive list of features see the FEATURES file.
----------------------
However, as with any program, bugs cannot be completely ruled out.
I tested the program extensively, and believe it should be relatively
bug free (no known bug at the time). Should, however, anyone find any
bugs (highly unlikely :-), I would be pleased (well, sort of :-) to hear
about it. Please send me the patches or bug report.
I'll look at them and will try to fix it in a future release.
(BTW, if you should find any spelling or grammar errors in these files,
don't hesitate to point them out to me; I like correct English just as much
as you do).
----------------------
I would like to take the opportunity to express my gratitude in particular
to these devoted users of the procmail-package. Without their constant
feedback procmail would not have looked the same:
David W. Tamkin An excellent proofreader and betatester
<dattier@wwa.com>
Josh Laff For stresstesting procmail (and me :-)
<jal@uiuc.edu>
Dan Jacobson For his many useful suggestions
<Dan_Jacobson@ATT.COM>
Rick Troxel Because I crashed his Convex way too often :-)
<rick@helix.nih.gov>
Roman Czyborra For his enthusiastic ideas
<czyborra@cs.tu-berlin.de>
Ari Kornfeld The guardian angel of SmartList
<ari@perspective.com>
----------------------
Please note that this program essentially is supposed to be static, that
means no extra features (honouring the VNIX spirit) are supposed to be
added (though any useful suggestions will be appreciated and evaluated if
time permits).
Cheers,
Stephen R. van den Berg of Cubic Circle, The Netherlands.
Internet E-mail: <srb@cuci.nl>
<berg@pool.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
Snail-Mail: P.O.Box 21074
6369 ZG Simpelveld
The Netherlands
Procmail mailinglist: <procmail-request@informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
SmartList mailinglist: <SmartList-request@informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
Procmail & SmartList updates and patches list (readonly):
<procmail-announce-request@informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
----------------------
A recent version can be picked up at various comp.sources.misc archives.
The latest version can be obtained from your friendly neighbour mirror site:
ftp://ftp.aist-nara.ac.jp/pub/misc/mail/filters/procmail
ftp://ftp.net.ohio-state.edu/pub/networking/mail/procmail
ftp://ftp.psg.com/pub/unix/procmail
ftp://hub.ucsb.edu/pub/mail (hand updated)
ftp://ftp.tamu.edu/pub/Unix/Mail (hand updated)
Or directly as:
ftp://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/packages/procmail/procmail.tar.gz
----------------------
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.