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:

United States
http://n.base.org/procmail/links.html
United Kingdom
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~procmail/faq/links.html
Please use a mirror if you can.

Here, you'll find a number of tutorials, a few example .procmailrc files, and some good examples of systems implemented in Procmail, including a number of spam-fighting systems. Then there are links to a few companion utilities to help you use Procmail more effectively. Finally, there's a section of more or less tangentially related information. This includes some links to introductory material about Unix mail handling which you might want to check out if you're new to Procmail and all this other stuff looks like Greek to you.

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 1.128 1998/03/19 14:36:43 reriksso 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.

Other Procmail link collections

So far, only one. Please mail me if you know about others. You can probably find some other useful sites by starting with this canned Alta Vista search for "procmail".
This merely attempts to strip out sites which have archives of the Procmail mailing list and/or otherwise a lot of Procmail material, on the theory that if you've looked around a little bit you will already have seen the stuff they can offer. What is left then is a very disparate collection of lone Procmail-related pages (presently, some 3,000 hits).
In and of itself, this is not particularly useful; you should refine the search to suit your needs before you actually use it. (Of course, in many situations, the mailing list archives contain exactly the stuff you're looking for. This one is primarily useful if you've been reading the Procmail-L mailing list yourself and are looking for information you know is not in the archives. I managed to find a couple of the Rich and Famous pages and a few of the tutorials using variants of this. Caveat Emptor: A lot of the stuff you find will be very old.)

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.

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.

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.

Spam-fighting tools

See also the net-abuse related links below.

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.

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.
Lars Wirzenius
One of the really classical "give my password or buzz off" implementations. Spamgard is another.
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.
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
(This is another link to the tips page; I wanted it here, too. See various entries above; you might prefer the text version unless you absolutely want live links.)

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.

Introductory material

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

Net Abuse / Spam fighting resources

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. There is hence a rather large assortment of spam-related Procmail pages.

Other sections on this page contain spam-related material as well (notably the spam-fighting section under Applications above), but the pages listed here are focused exclusively on net abuse topics.

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.)


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