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
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.
-
Infinite Ink's Procmail Page
This is a good switchboard site with links to all sorts
of Procmail-related stuff. Again, in the below listing, I have tried to
avoid duplicating links which are already available from
the Infinite Ink page. Check it out.
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.)
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.
- 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.)
- Brief howto-type documents
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.
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's Procmail library contains a number 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.
-
Jari Aalto has created another library
with small plug-in functions you can call from your own scripts.
Included are a MIME attachment killer, an autoresponder which
requires the correspondent to know a secret cookie before it will
respond, parse different kinds of dates, and a lot more.
(Send
mail to jari.aalto@poboxes.com with Subject: send help
to get instructions for retreiving all or parts of the library
by e-mail.)
-
SmartList,
available from the main Procmail site and mirrors,
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.
Here's
a copy of the INTRO file.
You can find more information in the SmartList distribution.
-
Eli the Bearded has compiled a Procmail with Perl embedded.
This is still beta (or even alpha) in nature, but if you are interested,
you'll find it at
ftp://ftp.netusa.net/users/eli/procmail3.11p7-perl.tar.gz
-
Spamgard(tm),
a spam deflector by Bill Evans.
-
Catherine A. Hampton's
Spam Bouncer
both bounces and auto-replies to unwanted mail (beta).
-
Gregory Sutter's and Matthew Hunt's
junkfilter
reportedly catches 90-95% of the authors' spam.
-
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."
-
J. Daniel Smith's
spamcheck
recipes
are available for anonymous ftp. You probably should have some prior
exposure to Procmail because there is no real documentation (yet).
-
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.
-
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). (Beta, I presume)
See also the
net-abuse related links
below.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
-
Check out what Yahoo has to say about
Any decent Unix beginners' book should treat both of the first topics
rather thoroughly.
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.
-
Spam links
-
Spam recipe collections
Many sites publish their own lists of
blocked domains which you can download and use in your own
Procmail recipes -- among them the following:
-
Concordia University
A collection of recipes; there are various cocktails to choose from,
including [modified] copies of the Panix and AOL lists.
-
spamkiller
by Elliot Lee has a similar combo, which includes a copy of AOL's
filters, a Cyberpromo filter, and some additional stuff.
-
panix.com
-
rahul.net
(not Procmail-compatible out of the box --
does anybody have a good conversion script?)
-
cybernothing.org
by the venerable JD Falk
-
AOL
-
Telebyte
with their local installation instructions and a
broad selection of scripts to pick and choose from
-
Petri Kaukasoina
tries to keep on top of changes in Cyberpromo, LLV, Quantcom etc.
domains and IP numbers. (The lists are useful as data lists to
fgrep
or similar, but just look at assorted Procmail
scripts in this section to find out how to do that.)
-
macabrus@aol.com
maintains various FAQs with lots of useful addresses and IP numbers
you can use.
-
Vortex.com
makes available their list of
smptpd
blocked sites.
This should be rather easy to transform into a set of
Procmail recipes.
-
http://www.cyberpass.net/~fekete/agis.rc
A canned recipe to implement a block against AGIS or CyberPromo
(this looks pretty outdated).
-
Net Access's 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's own filtering rules.)
Thanks to the providers of these services!
Also check out the self-contained
spam-fighting packages
in the Applications section (above).
-
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.
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.)
-
Doug Oard's collection of
@ href Information Filtering Resources http://www.ee.umd.edu/medlab/filter/
lists a lot of useful tools for information filtering in general.
-
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.)
-
The
user+box@host
Addressing FAQ
by Eli the Bearded
(mirrors on
faqs.org
and
ruu.nl
)
-
The Internet Mail Consortium's web site
contains various FAQs and other documents of interest
-- notably a good compilation of
mail-related Internet standards
-
The Sendmail FAQ
(mirrors on
faqs.org
and
ruu.nl
)
and
http://www.sendmail.org/
-
The Fetchmail FAQ
-
An Emil tutorial
[warning: needs a spelling check]
Emil is a program for conversion between MIME, Mailtool format, etc
-
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.
-
Also check out the various other FAQs for the
comp.mail
newsgroups -- on
faqs.org
or
ruu.nl
- 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.
-
The HTML Writers' Guild's
Filtering FAQ
contains interesting information about the filtering capabilities of
several e-mail clients, including Mac and Windows programs.
-
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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