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:

  1. You have Procmail installed on your system.
  2. You have a mail server configured to deliver emails to your system.
  3. 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.