How to decommission procmail?

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6 posts Page 1 of 1
by patty1 » Wed May 23, 2018 10:18 am
For years, I had my Sonic mail set up to send listmail to a separate file from my inbox, and to keep a log of how all incoming mail was handled. Both BULKFOLDER (for listmail) and LOGFOLDER (for the mail log) were in a subdirectory of my Sonic shell account. All of this was controlled by a "procmailrc-first" file in my home directory.

Some months ago, I commented out the lines in procmailrc-first that sent listmail to the subdirectory, so all listmail has been coming straight to my inbox. Now, I want to stop logging mail disposition and decommission procmailrc-first entirely. (The file also performs some whitelisting and blacklisting, but I can handle those functions with Sonic's web-based user tools.)

Is that as simple as removing (or at least renaming) procmailrc-first? I vaguely recall that procmailrc-first is a file that Sonic's mail servers look for when sending mail to a user's account; that is, it has a special status. I think procmailrc-first is even invoked before the spam filters that have been set on Sonic's website? I don't want to risk screwing up my mail processing by blindly removing procmailrc-first if I also need to make other changes to keep mail flowing smoothly. I'd appreciate any advice from knowledgeable procmail/shell users here.
by scott » Wed May 23, 2018 1:13 pm
patty1 wrote:For years, I had my Sonic mail set up to send listmail to a separate file from my inbox, and to keep a log of how all incoming mail was handled. Both BULKFOLDER (for listmail) and LOGFOLDER (for the mail log) were in a subdirectory of my Sonic shell account. All of this was controlled by a "procmailrc-first" file in my home directory.

Some months ago, I commented out the lines in procmailrc-first that sent listmail to the subdirectory, so all listmail has been coming straight to my inbox. Now, I want to stop logging mail disposition and decommission procmailrc-first entirely. (The file also performs some whitelisting and blacklisting, but I can handle those functions with Sonic's web-based user tools.)

Is that as simple as removing (or at least renaming) procmailrc-first? I vaguely recall that procmailrc-first is a file that Sonic's mail servers look for when sending mail to a user's account; that is, it has a special status. I think procmailrc-first is even invoked before the spam filters that have been set on Sonic's website? I don't want to risk screwing up my mail processing by blindly removing procmailrc-first if I also need to make other changes to keep mail flowing smoothly. I'd appreciate any advice from knowledgeable procmail/shell users here.
Hi,

I went looking for your .procmailrc-first to see if it could safely be renamed to something else. Didn't see it, so couldn't check on it. But if you've commented out everything in your .procmailrc-first, and everything works as expected, then you should be able to rename it to something else (so you can keep it around, just in case), and our systems will be fine with that.

In other words, our systems don't need for you to have a .procmailrc-first file, or even a .procmailrc file -- indeed, most folks don't have either of those.

-Scott
by patty1 » Wed May 23, 2018 3:33 pm
Hi, Scott. Thanks for your help!

Oddly enough, the file is not ".procmailrc-first". You'd expect that, wouldn't you? Those system-level control files usually do start with a period, such as ".cshrc" and ".login". When I set up "procmailrc-first" years ago, that's the name I was told to use. So if you look in my home directory, you'll see it under that name.

To clarify, I have NOT commented out the logging commands, only the listmail commands. In fact, I'm not entirely sure where the logging is coming from. Perhaps from "LOGABSTRACT=yes"? Or is the simple fact of there being a defined log file ("LOGFILE=${MAILDIR}/log") enough to trigger logging?

Maybe I'll get brave and rename the procmail file and send myself email to see what happens. :-)


Patty
by patty1 » Wed May 23, 2018 3:43 pm
Okay, I moved "procmailrc-first" to "procmailrc-first-old". Then I sent myself an email message. It came through to my inbox okay---but, it still ended up in Mail/log. I just discovered that I also have a ".procmailrc" file; I renamed that, and a second email test came through but did not get recorded in Mail/log.

I'm honestly not clear on the relationship between "procmailrc-first" and ".procmailrc", but renaming both of them seems to have stopped the mail logging. I'll keep an eye on things to make sure that my spam filtering on Sonic's website is sufficient.
by lr » Thu May 24, 2018 9:42 pm
If you'd like someone to send you a test message quickly to verify that things are working, let us know. It takes only seconds.
Linda and Ralph and John; 735 Sunset Ridge Road; Los Gatos, CA 95033; 408-395-1435
by patty1 » Fri May 25, 2018 10:40 am
Oh, thank you, Linda (or Ralph or John), that's very nice of you. All seems well, though; I've been receiving messages from my usual sources. A few things have ended up in graymail, but I can fix that.


Patty
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