Configuring procmail

Configuring procmail

You may wish to configure your mail so that all messages from an on-line form are delivered to a particular mailbox. To do this, you must edit your procmail configuration file. Procmail is a standard unix/linux tool that many mail systems, including that of the UW Math Department, use to filter mail. You can change the rules procmail uses to filter your mail by logging on to login.math.wisc.edu, and editing the file /auto/mail/<your-user-id>/.procmailrc. For example, if your user ID is 'bogus', you'd edit the file /auto/mail/bogus/.procmailrc. This file will already contain several procmail "recipes". A typical procmail recipe for filtering mail based on the subject of an email message would look like this:

   :0:
   * ^Subject: Online form: Computing Feedback
   .feedback/

More information on using procmail can be found on the [Using Procmail] page.

You can also automatically create a rule that filters messages into a mailbox via the newrule script. To use this program take the following steps. Create a new mail folder with your email program of choice. Send yourself a test message with your on-line form. Transfer the test message into your new mail folder. Log onto login.math.wisc.edu and run the newrule program. You must pass the newrule program the name of your mail folder. For example if your new folder is named 'feedback', you would type this: newrule feedback

The newrule program will examine the subject line of the message in the folder and automatically create a procmail rule to transfer any additional incoming messages with the same subject into the folder.