How to receive mails in procmail inbox
Procmail is a powerful email processing tool that allows you to filter, sort, and deliver emails to specific folders or inboxes. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to receive emails in a Procmail inbox:
Prerequisites:
- You have Procmail installed on your system.
- You have a mail server configured to deliver emails to your system.
- You have a Procmail configuration file (
.procmailrc
) in your home directory.
Step 1: Create a Procmail configuration file
Create a new file called .procmailrc
in your home directory (e.g., ~/.procmailrc
). This file will contain the Procmail configuration settings.
Step 2: Define the inbox folder
In the .procmailrc
file, add the following line to define the inbox folder:
INBOX=~/Mail/inbox
This sets the inbox folder to ~/Mail/inbox
.
Step 3: Define the email processing rules
Add the following lines to the .procmailrc
file to define the email processing rules:
:0
*? formail -xFrom
| formail -xTo
| formail -xSubject
These lines use the formail
command to extract the From, To, and Subject fields from each email and store them in variables.
Step 4: Deliver emails to the inbox folder
Add the following line to the .procmailrc
file to deliver emails to the inbox folder:
:0 c
| formail -A"From: $From" -A"To: $To" -A"Subject: $Subject" > $INBOX/
This line uses the formail
command to add the From, To, and Subject fields to the email headers and then delivers the email to the inbox folder.
Step 5: Save and reload the Procmail configuration
Save the .procmailrc
file and reload the Procmail configuration by running the following command:
procmail -f ~/.procmailrc
Step 6: Test the Procmail configuration
Send an email to your system and check if it is delivered to the inbox folder. You can use the mail
command to check the inbox folder:
mail -f ~/Mail/inbox
This should display the emails in the inbox folder.
That's it! With these steps, you should now be able to receive emails in a Procmail inbox.