[techtalk] Re: the Mail issue

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, May 11, 2000 at 03:05:30PM -0700 or thereabouts, Allen Heinecke wrote:
> At this point I understand that there should be a file someplace in my etc
> dir that controls access for sendmail, which is what I am currently using.
> However, I don't see one. I am going to make one and place it in the
> /etc/mail directory since that is where all of my other files are for
> sendmail... we'll see if that works.

Eep. I dunno :) Mine's in /etc as /etc/sendmail.cf

> Based on the ease of explanation and the majority vote it seemed to spark
> from here I just may switch back over to exim, it sure sounds easier to
> deal with...

I use sendmail mostly and don't touch it. It Just Runs. On one 
machine I use exim, and luckily that's where I've had to tinker to
alter things. I do find it simpler.

> On another note, where do I find more information about 'procmail' and
> .procmailrc files and such... I don't have any to actually look at on my
> system, if someone has one they just wanna send me I'd be grateful... for
> that and for any further information...

locate procmail (or: which procmail) will tell you if you have it already
man procmail, man procmailex, man procmailrc will tell you about it if so
www.procmail.org has many links.
http://www.hrweb.org/spambouncer/proctut.shtml is what got me started
http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/users/reriksso/procmail/mini-faq.html is
	not a "mini-faq" at all but about 140k. 

I think .procmailrcs are like people's first Makefiles and DocBook
attempts. No-one writes one from scratch: they borrow someone else's
and adapt. If you want to borrow mine, it's off
	http://roadrunner.swansea.linux.org.uk/~hobbit/cave.html
in what I hope is both an html format and a straight ascii "download
and edit" version. It's much more based around filtering mail into
folders than spambouncing, but the above links will give you all the
spambouncing you can handle. Stick it in your home directory and 
call it '.procmailrc'. If it's your own machine, you might consider
setting up a test account, sticking it there, and bouncing the whole
of your current inbox to it and seeing whether it works. I did that 
and met Evil Typos the first time or two.

Note that the recipes for linuxchix are out of date. I know, yes :)

> My thanks to everyone and I look forward to a time when I can actually
> offer assistance.

Reason I jump in with these things now is that it's so unusual for me
to be able to _provide_ the answers for once :) I am not used to this!

Telsa