Discussion about the Procmail mail delivery agent

Roberto Santarossa aka mongoose | 3 Jan 1996 19:49

Using BSD Mail to read from my mbox


Hi folks, I have just installed and configured procmail-3.11pre4. My
question deals with the behaviour of the BSD Mail utility. I used to
be able to read my mail from the $HOME/mbox file but since installing
procmail, the Mail utility seems to ignore the contents of the mbox.
If I run "Mail" it tells me that I have no mail. If I start it up with
Mail -f mbox, then I can see the messages. Am I doing something wrong?
Is there some recipe I need to add to my .procmailrc file?

I perused the "best_of_procmail_list" file but couldn't find anything
about this problem. If anyone has had this problem, would you be good
enough to provide a corrective measure.

THX.

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|                        | Speed doesn't kill, it's the sudden stops that do |
| Roberto Santarossa     |                                                   |
| E-mail: robertos <at> cae.ca| Gilles  Villeneuve        1982 Zolder, Belgium    |
| IRC Nick: mongoose     | Ricardo Paletti           1982 Montreal, Canada   |
| (514) 341-6780 (x2024) | Roland  Ratzenberger      1994 Imola, Italy       |
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Phil Edwards | 4 Jan 1996 03:03

Re: Using BSD Mail to read from my mbox


> Hi folks, I have just installed and configured procmail-3.11pre4. My
> question deals with the behaviour of the BSD Mail utility. I used to
> be able to read my mail from the $HOME/mbox file but since installing
> procmail, the Mail utility seems to ignore the contents of the mbox.
> If I run "Mail" it tells me that I have no mail. If I start it up with
> Mail -f mbox, then I can see the messages. Am I doing something wrong?
> Is there some recipe I need to add to my .procmailrc file?

It isn't procmail which is responsible for *reading* the
mail.  Procmail only delivers the mail; it's up to you
to read it.

The procmail package comes with three Bourne shell scripts
called {1,2,3}rmail, in the examples directory.  You should
use a script based on one of those to read the mail.

(Incidentally, Stephen, there's a typo in those scripts.  It
should be "your" favourite mailer.  

Luck++;
Phil

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