Debugging procmail

[Chris Devers]

On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Duane Morin wrote:

> Clues?  Is procmail dumping its output someplace I can look?

I think we may need more information about your set up -- what mail server
software are you using, and are you sure it is invoking things properly,
etc. Without knowing a little bit more, the most I can do is guess -- but
maybe others can glean more than I can :-)

That said, one of the best things you can do in your ~/.procmailrc is to
generate a log file. That'll at least tell you if procmail is being
invoked in the first place. It's great for debugging, and personally I
like leaving a `tail -f` running on my log file to let me know what mail I
have coming in & where it's getting filed away.

My ~/.procmailrc was written mostly by reading Nancy McGough's tutorials
at <http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/qs>. (Note: url is LONG,
not very well organized, occasionally repetitive, etc -- but there is a
lot of decent information there.) I've pasted the relevant bits from my
~/.procmailrc below; feel free to use & adapt it as you see fit:

    # Next may be needed if you invoke programs from your procmailrc
    # Details in Check Your $SHELL and $PATH in Troubleshooting below
    SHELL=/usr/bin/bash

    # Directory for storing procmail configuration and log files
    # You can name this environment variable anything you like
    # or, if you prefer, don't set it (but then don't refer to it!)
    PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail

    # Put ## before LOGFILE if you want no logging (not recommended)
    LOGFILE=$PMDIR/log

    # To insert a blank line between each message's log entry,
    # uncomment next two lines (this is helpful for debugging)
    LOG="
    "

    # Set to yes when debugging
    VERBOSE=no

    # Remove ## when debugging; set to no if you want minimal logging
    ##LOGABSTRACT=all

    # Replace $HOME/Msgs with your mailbox directory
    # Mutt and elm use $HOME/Mail
    # Pine uses $HOME/mail
    # Netscape Messenger uses $HOME/nsmail
    # Some NNTP clients, such as slrn & nn, use $HOME/News
    # Mailboxes in maildir format are often put in $HOME/Maildir
    # NOTE: Upon reading the next line, Procmail does a chdir to
    #       $MAILDIR and relative paths are relative to $MAILDIR
    MAILDIR=$HOME/mail

    # Everything above has been "infrastructure", setting up how the
    # procmail system will work for me. The next few lines call in
    # the actual recipes. Once nice thing about doing it this way is
    # that it's easy to comment out a whole block of rules if needed,
    # or rearrange the order in which they get called, etc.
    INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/personal_mail
    INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/antispam
    INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/work
    INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/mailing_lists

    # Messages that fall through all your procmail recipes are delivered
    # to your default INBOX

If you don't see anything useful to you here, you may want to look at
samples from dotfiles.com too. There is a decent collection of config
files for various tools there, including procmail.



-- 
Chris Devers