[techtalk] automatically process email

[Gene Dolgner]

Greetings!  I'm new to the group, so please excuse if my post comes
through incorrectly.  Been busy lately, so all I've been doing is
just reading and not participating (believe they call that lurking).
My interest in Linux has been for personal use so far, and have
found most of the subjects over my head.  But, I have had personal
experience with this subject, so here it goes ...

I was a mail admin at a large corporation a year or so ago and one
of the processes I needed to set up on a Sun Solaris mail server
(UNIX) was to automate the distribution of "root" mail on a daily
basis.  I opt'd for the | in the .forward method, utilizing a Perl
script to do the work.  However, I very quickly scrapped the idea
when I, unfortunately, discovered that if this script should fail,
it will send mail to "root" noting such, to which it will also
fail, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth.

Needless to say, I downed one of the mail servers in seconds flat!
Not recommended.

Thanx for listening!
Gene Dolgner

Laurel Fan wrote:
> 
> Excerpts from linuxchix: 9-May-100 [techtalk] automatically pr.. by
> "Christian MacAuley"@jel
> > This is probably a really basic question, but i can't find an example of it
> > anywhere.  I set up an email account on my FreeBSD server.  When this
> > account receives an email, i want it a Perl script to execute and read that
> > email.
> 
> For that, you can use a | in a .forward file (I think FreeBSD has
> a forward manpage).  If you want to do anything more complicated than
> that (like run a different script for different From addresses), then
> you want to use procmail.
> 
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