Procmail Links

To keep the Procmail FAQ at a manageable size, I've opted to list only the most central web links in the FAQ itself. This page, then, is more of a kitchen-sink collection.

The URL of this page is http://www.iki.fi/era/procmail/links.html and it is mirrored at the following sites:

North America: http://mirror.ncsa.uiuc.edu/procmail-faq/; http://n.base.org/procmail/links.html; http://www.moongroup.com/docs/procmail/
Europe: http://www.xs4all.nl/~sister/mirror/procmail/

Please use a mirror if you can.

News / Nov 25 1999: Procmail v3.14 is out now! But please stick to 3.13.1 for the time being, or wait for 3.15, which should be out soon.

Central Information (links to the Procmail package itself, documentation, etc)
- Other Procmail Link Collections
Procmail Tutorials (introductory texts and "howto" documents)
Pearls from the Mailing List
Procmail Applications (various library files or systems implemented in Procmail)
- Spam-Fighting Tools (this must be one of the most widespread uses of Procmail)
  - Net Abuse / Spam-Fighting Resources (stuff without a direct Procmail connection, but perhaps useful for filtering spam)
Procmail Utilities (tools for summarizing log files, enhancing Procmail's functionality, etc)
Procmail Pages of the Rich and Famous (example .procmailrc files, musings on mail filtering, etc)
Tangential Information
- Introductory Material (primarily about Unix mail handling; check out these links if all this other stuff looks like Klingon to you)
- Related Internet RFC:s (standards documents specifying various mail-related protocols etc)
- Other Assorted Information
  - Various FAQs (useful e-mail tricks, FAQs for various e-mail programs and protocols)
  - Other Related Documents and Link Collections (filtering theory; more mail and RFC-related stuff; manual pages ...)
  - Usenet (newsgroups of interest)
  - Competing Efforts (other filtering programs for Unix and other platforms)

You will also doubtlessly find a few broken links. Please mail me about those so I can fix them, for the surfing pleasure of coming generations.

Version information:
$Id: links.prep,v 1.268 2000/02/24 09:31:08 era Exp $
The version history details recent developments

Central information

Just to keep this link collection reasonably self-contained, here is a fleshed-out repeat of the central links mentioned in the FAQ itself.

I also try to include links to "competing" link collections. I do not wish to hijack information from other sites and thus I hope you will check out what these other collections have to offer. Please mail me if you have links to other collections you think I should include.

For completeness' sake, a link back to my attempt at a Procmail FAQ and to a Procmail Quick Reference (which is still a beta version, but hopefully useful to somebody).
An official home page for Procmail is being developed at http://www.procmail.org/
- The source is also available from the following sites (get the newest version; definitely avoid 3.10.)
- A snapshot of the in-development sources is updated daily at http://www.procmail.org/procmail-snapshot.tar.gz
- There is also a todo list with plans for the next release.
- If you are interested in the development of the next version, you might also want to subscribe to the procmail-dev mailing list.
The Procmail mailing list is a valuable resource and shock-full of helpful and knowledgeable people. General help and subscribe/unsubscribe instructions are available (actually this is the standard SmartList blurb).
The list discussions are archived in part or in full at least at the following sites:
- Achim Bohnet's HyperMail archive is definitely the most popular. Probably it's also the most complete, going back to October 1995.
- Linköping University's MHonArc archive has a partial archive.
- If you try searching on Alta Vista, there's an obnoxious archive at http://alt.venus.co.uk/ which gives loads of hits but which never really seems to be up.
If you are unable or unwilling to use the WWW archives, try to find a web-to-mail server (see the "useful things by e-mail" links below) you can use. The Procmail listserv only stores a limited number of the most recent messages. (If that's what you want, mail the mailing list server with the word "help" in the Subject: line and you'll get [somewhat terse] instructions for how to access the archive by e-mail.)
- The "Pearls" section below has some good tips from the mailing list.
- The Best of Procmail archive compilation contains a wealth of good tips (although some of them are wearing a bit old, the archive being from 1995. There's a surfable mirror in the Mirror Cupboard but it lacks an index and a search engine).
- Jari Aalto has gathered his own "best of" compilation in one big happy HTML file (a text version also available). See also Jari's entry in the Rich and Famous section.
Online copies of the Procmail manual pages are available from many places. You can probably find a multitude of sites with a web-based manual page server which have the Procmail pages -- try this Alta Vista search or look at my crude text-only local copies from the 3.11pre7 distribution (the various man2html hits you'll get on Alta Vista are not necessarily or even likely for the newest version):
I keep some files from the Procmail distribution underneath this web page for easy reference:
FAQ
(that's the locally made HTML version; the text-only original is also here);
Frequently Asked Questions, Stephen van den Berg's original FAQ. Mostly addresses compilation and getting started.
README
Mostly lists compelling reasons to install Procmail :-)
HISTORY Version history for Procmail, incomplete
INSTALL
Installation notes
examples/advanced
Discusses the following administrative issues:
- Shared home directories in a diverse environment
- Installing Procmail as your site-wide MDA (with Sendmail, ZMailer, smail, or mailsurr)
- Changing the mail spool directory for all users
- Security considerations
Some of the stuff here is (experimentally) mirrored at the (experimental) Procmail Mirror Cupboard.

Procmail Tutorials

There are several good tutorials for Unix newbies, although many of them are more or less tied to the site where they were written. For the most part, these tutorials do not presuppose a lot of knowledge about Unix or mail handling on Unix.

None of the material in the "howto" section is exactly rocket science, either -- let's just say it contains a lot less of this "pause now if your head hurts already" nonsense.

If you're only interested in spam filtering, check out the spam-fighting section below instead.

Newbie-level material
Many of the documents towards the end of this list contain some minor glitches or inaccuracies. But they all have their merits when it comes to presenting the issues, and none of the examples should be dangerous or anything. (You might want to check out the pitfalls section of the FAQ for some typical problems if you'd like to try to figure out where they go wrong.)
- Infinite Ink's Procmail Quick Start is a nice Procmail tutorial and has a good discussion of general issues. This used to be part of the older "Filtering Mail FAQ" which is still available from the same site as well.
- A tutorial by Jim Dennis walking you through how to refuse mail from certain addresses, touching upon other "standard" uses of Procmail along the way -- by and large an early version of Linux Gazette's "Mini-Tutorial", also by Jim Dennis
  (approx. 20 k)
- Catherine A. Hampton's "Getting Started with Procmail"
- Halcyon's Procmail Guide is a good introduction if you're familiar with Unix basics
- Ian Sobroff's Procmail How-To Page at the UMBC or the close derivative on another Maryland server
- Joe Gross's tutorial seems to have disappeared from the Net but the Mirror Cupboard has a copy
- Another UIUC page
- Procmail with Pine for Dalhousie University
  (warning: terribly Netscape-dehanced page design)
- Digiweb's Procmail page, Tony McLaughlin's Email Page, and the venerable !@¿&ing Procmail!!!
Brief howto-type documents
- Phil Edwards walks you through reading the man pages :-)
  [The formatting of this page is funny; look at the HTML source instead]
- An example / cookbook message cooked up by Tony Nugent covering somewhat more advanced techniques, including MIME decoding, stripping of PGP headers and .signatures, and eliminating duplicate messages.
  (roughly 7 k)
- Samuel Mikes has written a FAQ about using Procmail with VM, the Emacs mail reader. Probably worth a look even if you wonder about interfacing Procmail with some other Emacs mail mode.
- Concordia University has a Procmail intro with a heavy slant towards rejecting spam and other unwanted mail.
- Internet Images Worldwide has a short but very concise example of an autoresponder setup.
- Adam Shostack's PGP Automatic Key Retrieval script

See also the next section, "Pearls from the Mailing List", for some practical examples of how to accomplish slightly tricky things with Procmail.

The Procmail pages in the "Rich and Famous" section (below) also contain suitable working examples, including several approaches to refusing junk mail, vacation recipes, ftp-by-mail servers, etc.

The Mini-FAQ basically assumes you are somewhat familiar with the manuals and with "normal" stuff people do with Procmail. It does have an introductory section, though, and some tips for debugging your recipes.

Pearls from the Mailing List

Here's a collection of pointers to good articles in the on-line archives of the Procmail mailing list.

Many of these are answers to recurring questions, but above all, all of them should be worth a look simply because they are good examples of coding style and problem solving. (Dsiclaimer: Okay, maybe not my own :-)

The archive server doesn't always manage to find all messages in a thread, so if you get the feeling you are missing part of the picture, you may want to dive up to the "Thread Index" for the month you are looking at, and look for related messages.

MATCH grabbing

This is a useful trick to add to your toolbox. Frequently, people use something like SUBJECT=`formail -XSubject:` when they would not need to call an external program at all. It's a simple optimization, although understanding the syntax is a bit challenging if you haven't worked a lot with Procmail's advanced constructs.

The FAQ has a short aside about this topic but you might want to look at the following treatment of the subject from the mailing list:

http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/2000-02/msg00232.html (but do read the entire thread)

Forwarding to a pager

One of David Tamkin's classics; his pager forwarding recipe. (You might also want to look at http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1997-12/msg00125.html which is about chunking a long message into shorter pieces for a pager. Another thread is at http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1997-07/msg00167.html with some additional ideas about chunking messages. The archive missed some follow-ups; look at the threaded index for cues. Also check out the thread "Condition with BODY length?")

How to reply with a copy of the headers you are replying to

Another pearl by David: a sed script for sending bounces which include the headers of the bounced message (version 1 and version 2)

Counting the number of recipients

A frequently wanted item from the archives is the Canonical Recipe for Counting the Number of Recipients. This is trickier than it seems at first because you have to use Resent- headers if they are present, and try to parse out the actual addresses from each line. This version was mostly hashed out by David Tamkin and Philip Guenther. A summarized version is at http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1997-08/msg00073.html

Keeping a list of spammers (or other addresses) in a file

Another one from the archives, on how to keep your spammers list in an external file which Procmail reads (by yours truly, no less :^): http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1998-12/msg00100.html

Here's a slightly different tack on the same topic: http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1999-03/msg00115.html -- this is more about keeping stuff in lists than about spammers.

And here's a posting specifically about killfiling mail from certain people -- not particularly spammers: http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/2000-02/msg00231.html

Sending a periodic notification about new mail

And here's a thread where David Tamkin and Bennett Todd develop a method for sending a notification when there's new mail, but only send one notification per day (or whatever period you choose): http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1998-12/msg00007.html (read the follow-ups, too -- notice this one, by Rik Kabel, as well.)

Trimming signatures

David Tamkin's take on trimming long .signature blocks: http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1997-05/msg00683.html ... and an older sketch by yours truly: http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1996-09/msg00028.html

There's an old archive file called "Best of the Procmail List" which is still available from the Procmail distribution sites. Jari's Procmail Tips page started out as a condensed (and later, expanded :-) version of that file.

Procmail Applications

This section includes some good examples of more-complicated mail processing systems and library files. Many of these are systems you can install and use without delving into the details of how they work or even necessarily learning how to use Procmail on its own.

Again, some of the "Rich and Famous" pages below would fit in this category, too.

Alan Stebbens' Procmail library: This is a collection of "jigsaw pieces" -- smallish Procmail scriptlets -- for building an advanced mail handling system. Just install the whole package and use the parts you want; the examples include an autoresponder and an "ftp by mail" system.; You can get it by e-mail from Alan's Mailer Daemon at alan.stebbens@software.com (use the Subject line "send procmail library" -- without the quotes, of course) or get a mirrored copy from the "Procmail Mirror Cupboard" on Xoom.
Jari Aalto's Procmail library: Like the previous item, this contains a number of small plug-in functions you can call from your own scripts. Included are a MIME attachment killer/extractor, an autoresponder which requires the correspondent to know a secret cookie before it will respond, a parser for different kinds of dates, and a lot more.; The primary location for this is now http://www.procmail.org/jari/
SmartList: This must be the prime example of a Procmail application in widespread use. It is a mailing list server (a la Listproc and Majordomo) written entirely in the form of Procmail scripts.; Available from the main Procmail site and mirrors.; Here's a copy of the INTRO file. You can find more information in the SmartList distribution. You'll also want to check out the SmartList FAQ which is now maintained by Peter Hartzler.
Procmail with Perl embedded: This is a somewhat experimental offering by Eli the Bearded.; Available from ftp://ftp.netusa.net/users/eli/procmail3.11p7-perl.tar.gz

Spam-Fighting Tools

Procmail makes for a very nice framework for filtering spam, although your provider should also offer other front-line defenses such as total blocking of all connections from known spam factories.

If you are merely looking for a way to put Procmail to use for blocking unwanted mail, it's probably best to simply download one of the prepackaged solutions listed here.

Check out the link to Leah Roberts' link site above. Most of the below sites are listed there, and some other useful ones as well.

Spamgard(tm), a password-based spam deflector by Bill Evans.
Catherine A. Hampton's Spam Bouncer both bounces and auto-replies to unwanted mail.
Gregory Sutter's junkfilter reportedly catches 90-95% of the author's spam.
Bob's Spam Filter comes with a pretty good introduction on setting up Procmail.
Steven Tucker's spamkill filter is easy to configure even without learning Procmail's language.
The Simple Procmail Anti-Spam Template, or SPAST by Chrissy LeMaire, allows you to filter on keywords in files. Not the best possible approach, but it makes it easy to get started.
Another package is Spamtrap by Farhad Anklesaria, who describes it thus: "nothing startlingly new here, just a convenient package that we are using and that anyone else is welcome to."
Bob's Spam Filter is pretty much run-of-the-mill, and requires some slight adaptation, but it's simple and straightforward.
Walter Dnes' Spamdunk is intended for Procmail newbies (and incidentally his pages include a nice regular expression primer for the Unix challenged).
Timo Salmi has created a passwording "spamfoil" filter which comes with extensive comments (mostly geared towards newbies).
You might also want to check out John Hardin's "anti-spam-and-other-garbage rules" package. This also has a very informative companion page, called "Enhancing E-Mail Security with Procmail".
Don Doumakes has implemented NoCeM for E-mail, a rather novel concept; when you come up with a good Procmail recipe, you PGP sign it and send it off to a nocem-e mailing list.
On the receiving end, you have software to automatically add recipes from people you trust, with the option to add recipes from other people manually.
- To subscribe to Don's list, see the instructions on his Abuse page. (Don's page also has many links to non-Procmail spam tools.)
- Dougal Campbell has started up a general nocem-e-notices mailing list
- [The original NoCeM is for Usenet and works rather differently; http://www.cm.org/ has an introduction and some tools.]
(Beta.)
forrep, a script by Doug Muth which uses Formail to pick out appropriate complaint addresses from a spam message. The above link is to an old version which used formail; the newest version uses only sh and is available at http://www.claws-and-paws.com/unix/forrep.sh.html
adcomplain is a similar script by Bill McFadden.
spamometer, a Perl script by Terry Jones for determining if a message is spam (or rather, actually, a framework for hooking up your own spam-detecting Perl functions).

Net Abuse / Spam-Fighting Resources

The following links don't necessarily have a lot with Procmail to do, but may be useful to you if you are looking for more information about spam, or filtering lists you can use, etc

Spam links
- Fight Spam on the Internet!
  This is not really all you need to know about spam and net.abuse but it's a good start and has some good forward links.
- Concordia University's spam links are definitely worth a look, too. (Quite a few Procmail-related links, by the way.)
Spam recipe collections
Many sites publish their own lists of blocked domains which you can download and use in your own Procmail recipes. Due to the nature of the problem, blacklists grow outdated fairly quickly nowadays, but some of these contain other useful stuff too:
- Concordia University
  A collection of recipes; there are various cocktails to choose from, including the best of the others listed below.
- spamkiller by Elliot Lee has a similar combo, which includes a copy of AOL's (old) filters, an (old) Cyberpromo filter, and some additional stuff.
- panix.com
- rahul.net (not Procmail-compatible out of the box -- does anybody have a good conversion script?)
- Telebyte with their local installation instructions and a broad selection of scripts to pick and choose from
- macabrus@aol.com maintains various FAQs with lots of useful addresses and IP numbers you can use.
- Vortex.com makes available their list of smtpd blocked sites. This should be rather easy to transform into a set of Procmail recipes.
- Net Access' UCE filter has some brief instructions for how to set up a spam filter of your own. This assumes you have already set up Procmail and understand a bit of how it works. (You'll also probably want to request a copy of Net Access' own filtering rules.)
- Telerama have a simple score-based filter which they offer as a model for how to roll your own. The list of blocked domains is hopelessly outdated, but it's useful as a starting point for your own experiments.
Thanks to the providers of these services!
For test material, take a look at Axel Zinser's searchable archive of the spam-list -- and if you want a continuous feed of cannon fodder, subscribe to the list and set up a Procmail filter to throw away everything matched by your present spam filters, and put the rest in a folder where you can look at it when you're in the mood to modify your filters.

Procmail Utilities

This section has links to programs which are not necessary for operating Procmail but which can be helpful in configuring Procmail, writing advanced scripts, diagnosing problems in your setup, and other associated chores.

proclint, a program for checking your Procmail recipe files for various errors, is available as part of Alan Stebbens' Procmail library (see above).
Eli the Bearded has created a Perl program called bounce which creates MIME bounce messages.
In the same package, you'll also find hashd, a generalized duplicate checker.
A program by Gary Funck called mdate tries to canonicalize date stamps as found in mail messages. (It's probably not 100% effective, as per the comments in the associated discussion thread.)
Martin Ramsch has written a Elm filter to Procmail converter
A Procmail minor mode for Emacs, tinypm.el by Jari Aalto, features syntax highlighting and a limited lint (or apparently more like a post-mortem debugger :-) facility. (You need some other stuff from the same ftp site to get it to work. The file contains the details, or read Jari's announcement.) See also below.
Aaron Turner's proclog is a tool for analyzing your Procmail logs (somewhat similar to mailstat which comes with Procmail)
Moon Io's Autoresponder is a Perl script to make and configure Procmail autoresponders.
The Dotfile Generator by Jesper Pedersen et al. can generate a .procmailrc file for you -- as well as .dotfiles for various other Unix programs -- according to your wishes. Ideal for newbies. (Still in beta.)
Edward S. Marshall has implemented a simple RBL lookup tool which allows you to use RBL-type blacklists from within Procmail (example included; now up to v1.4). A listing of RBL-type services you can use with this tool is at http://www.iki.fi/era/rbl/rbl.html

This listing is not nearly exhaustive, and is somewhat likely to contain broken links at any given time. A good place to look for Procmail-related utilities is Freshmeat.

Procmail Pages of the Rich and Famous

As a rule, these pages contain both some sort of short introduction to Procmail and some example snippets from the authors' Procmail recipes.

Eli the Bearded: Various interesting stuff, mostly to keep unwelcome stuff out (not just spam, though)
Barry Twycross: Another really elaborate live .procmailrc with some nifty header handling (thanks to Eli for the pointer)
Mike Rose: Several modular example .rc files (thanks to Simeon)
Cameron Laird: Worth checking out for the copy of Craig Johnston's .procmailrc alone, with more to come. And of course, there's this magazine article about Procmail, and the MTA comparison.
Roman Czyborra (in German): Automatic Quoted-Printable decoding, some examples, and some good texts about why to use Procmail in the first place
Felix von Leitner: Live .procmailrc (including more umlauts as well as PGP attachment handing), and a little bashing of elm's pathetic filter :-)
Sven Guckes: Another live .procmailrc with some interesting features; note the strong similarities with the previous one (it's not clear to me who's borrowing from whom, but you might want to compare them just for fun)
Jari Aalto: Jari's Procmail tips page is also available in a text-only version; this is a vast and sometimes slightly verbose collection of bits and pieces of Procmail information.; Jari's Procmail library contains various parts you can plug into your own recipes.; Jari's University account is being closed but his stuff lingers on. For the time being at least, there is a mirror of Jari's ftp directory (not just the Procmail parts) at http://mirror.ncsa.uiuc.edu/procmail/ssjaaa/
Christopher Lindsey: Chris has a wishlist for Procmail bug fixes and new features and a budding patch collection
Timothy Luoma: Notes about Procmail on NeXTStep/OpenStep and a My Deja script
... and yours truly :-): Procmail debugging tips; Moronic Mail Responders
(No! Don't click that link!)

Tangential Information

Here's where I try to include other relevant stuff about mail handling in general. Sendmail and spam filtering are two obvious picks of topics, but if you have other relevant links you think would fit here, please don't hesitate to mail me with them.

Spam, or unsolicited bulk e-mail, is an ubiquitous problem on today's Internet and apparently one of the foremost reasons people get interested in using Procmail. Other sections on this page contain spam-related material (notably the Spam-Fighting Tools section under Applications above).

Introductory Material

If everything else you read here is <insert favorite language you do not understand here> to you, the following might help.

Among the entries in the tutorials section, several are fairly newbie-oriented. Try the Filtering Mail FAQ for starters.
The net is full of Unix-related pages, but it's hard to find something reasonably newbie-oriented which still is general enough to be of interest to Unix newbies everywhere. But try these:
- A simple introduction to regular expressions from HotWired
- A somewhat more involved (and accurate) one from the Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing
- Geek Speak -- links to on-line references, tutorials, etc. Includes several local Procmail pages, too.
- comp.unix.shell FAQs (ruu.nl)
- Unix Guru Universe -- more links; not necessarily so newbie oriented.
- Heiner's Shelldorado -- lots of shell programming stuff and links.
In general, look for information about shell programming, regular expressions, and mail handling on Unix. Any decent Unix beginners' book should treat both of the first topics rather thoroughly.

Related Internet RFC:s

Links are to ISI's ftp RFC archive, with the secondary pointing to Institut Pasteur's repository in France.

RFC 821 defines the SMTP protocol. See also RFC 1869. (Secondary)
RFC 822 defines the general format of mail headers. (Secondary)
RFC 934 defines a standard for message encapsulation. MIME should probably be used instead. (Secondary)
RFC 1123 contains some general updates and notes. (Secondary)
RFC 1225 defines the POP protocol. (Secondary) See also RFC 1957 for some comments on common implementations. (Secondary)
RFC 1855 has netiquette guidelines. (Secondary)
RFC 1869 defines the ESMTP protocol. (Secondary)
RFC 1894 defines a standard bounce format. This is not in universal use but if you produce your own bounces, you should probably try to conform to this. (Secondary)
RFC:s 2045 - 2049 define the MIME protocol. (Secondary)
RFC 2060 defines the IMAP protocol. (Secondary)
RFC 2076 lists common Internet message headers. (Secondary)

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html has a listing of other RFC repositories if neither of the ones listed here seems to work.

Other Assorted Information

Here are links to other topics which might be of interest to the broad Procmail-using public.

Many of the below documents are Usenet FAQs; when available, I've included a pointer to a primary site, but otherwise, I've used pointers to the WWW FAQ archives at faqs.org (USA) and ruu.nl (the Netherlands) -- you should primarily use the one closer to you. If you are comfortable retreiving the FAQs by ftp instead, by all means use that and get them from your closest RTFM mirror.
(In Internet topology, Australia and the Far East are generally closer to the US than to Europe. As for Africa and the Antarctic, I really don't know, but I'd guess users from those continents, too, had better try the US sites first. YMMV.)

Other than FAQs, this is mostly link collections of all sorts. If you find one that you think should be listed here, let me know.

Various FAQs
- Useful things you can do with e-mail, part I: The Accessing the Internet by e-mail FAQ (faqs.org or ruu.nl)
  This is rather newbie-oriented, but has a lot of pointers to valuable or interesting gateway servers.
- Useful things you can do with e-mail, part II: The email4u FAQ (Yes, the title and the formatting are atrocious, but it has addresses of a couple of mail bouncer services, and a host of other useful things. Here's a German mirror, too.)
- Steve Harris' stats of various ftp-by-mail servers
- The user+box@host Addressing FAQ by Eli the Bearded (on faqs.org; mirror on ruu.nl)
- Chris Lewis' newly revitalized Unix Email Software Survey is a good overview of different mail utilities. (ruu.nl mirror)
- The Sendmail FAQ (mirrors on faqs.org and ruu.nl) and http://www.sendmail.org/
- The Fetchmail FAQ
- The LAN mail protocols FAQ provides a nice overview of protocols and clients (and not just for LANs). (faqs.org mirror or ruu.nl)
- The MIME FAQs on faqs.org or ruu.nl
  Parts 1 (general introduction -- faqs.org or ruu.nl) and 6 (decoding tools -- faqs.org or ruu.nl) are of particular interest. These FAQs appear to no longer be maintained or posted, so these links might stop working. For the time being, as a first aid, there is a mirror at http://www.iki.fi/era/mirrors/comp-mail-mime-faq/ -- obviously, some or all of the material will be out of date, but it's better than nothing, and many of the links to tools etc still work.
- Also check out the various other FAQs for the comp.mail newsgroups -- on faqs.org or ruu.nl
Other Related Documents and Link Collections
- Doug Oard's collection of Information Filtering Resources lists a lot of useful tools for information filtering in general.
- Dan Bernstein maintains a very thorough Internet Mail message header format web page -- and a host of other interesting information; surf around if you have the time.
- Simple newbie-level article about the anatomy of email messages
- The Internet Mail Consortium's web site contains various FAQs and other documents of interest -- notably a good compilation of mail-related Internet standards (RFC:s).
- DNS.net's SMTP Resources Directory
- Some other general mail-related link collections:
  - Bill Wohler's / Worldtalk's list of e-mail references -- RFC:s and current drafts.
  - Claus Aßman's web pages contain a lot of email-related material -- the majority of the stuff is primarily sendmail-oriented, but don't let that scare you; there are many gems here.
  - UK Online's link collection is fairly concise and focused.
  - The Cyrus project at CMU has a collection of email-related pages with a listing of filtering programs --- primarily for Windows as well as a listing of email FAQs.
  - The IETF DRUMS working group
- If you are looking for a specific RFC, there are some good RFC search engines out there. Check out http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html for pointers.
- Documentation on the Berkeley mbox format is available from e.g. the Pine technical notes or the Qmail manuals
- An Emil tutorial [warning: needs a spelling check]
  Emil is a program for conversion between MIME, Mailtool format, uuencode, etc
Usenet
- More or less relevant newsgroups include comp.mail.misc and perhaps comp.mail.headers and comp.mail.mime. You should also be aware of comp.mail.imap, comp.mail.sendmail, and the other program-specific newsgroups in the comp.mail hierarchy. (See the previous item for FAQ links.) Various Unix programming groups -- perhaps especially comp.unix.shell should also prove worth a visit.
Competing Efforts -- email filtering for other platforms, and other offerings for Unix users
- grepmail is a tool for finding messages in mbox folders.
- The Open Directory Project's mail filtering stuff is probably in better hands than this little link collection.
- A promising newcomer on the Unix filtering scene is Maildrop by Mr. Sam.
- vacation(1) comes standard with most Unix distributions. It's just a simple autoresponder (not a filtering program) but it does what it does reasonably well if that's all you need (and you don't happen to be the lucky owner of one of the many wonderfully broken versions out there).
- mailagent is written entirely in Perl, for better or, well, for worse.
- Another Unix offering for the strong of stomach is Elm's filter program. The syntax is Pascal-like and it's otherwise not too exciting either. See the Mail Filtering FAQ above for details, or check out Sven Guckes' filter page
- The HTML Writers' Guild's Filtering FAQ contains interesting information about the filtering capabilities of several e-mail clients, including Mac and Windows programs.
- See also the Andrew link collection above.
- newsbot is a filtering system for Usenet news, for use with INN. (Also available as an alt.sources posting at http://sunsite.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr/pub/isc/inn/contrib/newsbot -- this is verison 1.2.1 from 1996, which still seems to be the newest.)
- Another popular news filtering system is Brad Knowles' NewsClip.
- See also the pointer to Doug Oard's links, above.
How Do You Spell The Guy's Name? (Look at the word count near the bottom of the page ... apparently, there actually is a Steven van den Bergh who is not the author of Procmail :-)

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