September 2003 - March 2007 News from the Procmail Quick Start
A few days ago I removed the Procmail-Related News and Advertisements section from my Procmail Quick Start. For historical purposes, here are the News items. I haven't decided what I'm going to do with the Advertisements, but I'm thinking I'm going to switch to a little donation button. As you can see from my Anti-Phishing Email Address Strategy blog post that I posted more than a year ago, it takes me a long time to make a decision like this!
- (These old Procmail-related news items are displayed only on the permalink for this blog post.)
- 2007 March 2 SeaMonkey Suite 1.1.1 released. I discuss why I use SeaMonkey Suite, which includes a mail & news client and was formerly known as Mozilla Suite, in SeaMonkey Suite 1.0.1 and Send This Page in my blog, and in Seamonkey mail vs Thunderbird in mozilla.support.seamonkey.
Note: SeaMonkey Suite 1.1+ supports many (maybe infinitely many?) IMAP keywords. IMAP Keywords are discussed in Setting Keywords or Labels below. ![[Spamassassin]](http://www.ii.com/images/spamassassin120x53.jpg "SpamAssassin logo")
2007 February 14 The Apache Software Foundation released SpamAssassin 3.1.8. SpamAssassin 3.0+ includes support for SPF, which is an extension to SMTP that tries to fight email-address forgery.
To ensure that your outgoing email messages are not considered forgeries by SPF, I recommend that you use the SPF tester at DNSstuff.com, at Kitterman.com, at Pobox.com, or at Microsoft to see if your SMTP MAIL FROM (Return-Path) address and your outgoing SMTP server are an acceptable combination. I describe how to plug SpamAssassin into Procmail in Using SpamAssassin below.- 2007 January 30 In my blog, I posted an item titled Building and Installing Alpine (Apache-Licensed Pine). Alpine, which is basically Pine 5.0, is an excellent cross-platform IMAP client. Since it -- unlike Pine -- is FLOSS, you can create and distribute a patched version of it. For example, you might want to create a patch to make it easy to use Alpine to update a Procmail greenlist (discussed below). You could then distribute the patched Alpine to your users and the Procmail & Alpine communities (hint hint!).
- 2006 October 17-22 In a comp.mail.misc thread titled Seeking beta testers for procmail-related program, Jim Dalton announced and discussed RW4M (Recipe Wizard for the Masses). RW4M is free/gratis and “runs on MS Windows and provides a wizard for creating procmail recipes and simplifies other procmail-related tasks.”
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![[purple mulberry]](http://www.ii.com/images/mulberryicon.gif "Mulberry icon")
2006 September 20 and 25 Cyrus Daboo released Mulberry 4.0.6 and I posted a blog item titled One-Click Tagging in Mulberry. If you would like to really understand IMAP or IMAP keywords, I recommend that you use Mulberry as one of your IMAP clients. To learn more about IMAP keywords, see Setting Keywords or Labels below. - 2006 August 20 Mulberry, which is a cross-platform email and calendar client, is now free/gratis and version 4.0.5 has been released. This is great news for IMAP users, especially if you use (or want to use) IMAP keywords, LDAP address books, or the Sieve filtering language. I discuss how to use Procmail to set IMAP keywords on incoming messages in Setting Keywords or Labels below. I discuss the trend towards making software free (both gratis and libre) in Freeing the IMAP Clients at Deflexion.com.
- 2006 May 17 In my blog, I posted an item titled Server-Side Message Labels, which describes how I use labels to help me manage my email. I discuss how to use Procmail to set labels on incoming messages in Setting Keywords or Labels below.
- 2006 May 15 In my blog, I posted an item titled Server-Side Address Books and Server-Side Greenlists. This blog item, as well as the Minimizing False Positives With Greenlists and Bluelists section below, might be useful to you if you use a greenlist (aka whitelist) to help you separate spam from non-spam.
- 2006 April 1 Updated the Notes in Setting Keywords or Labels below so that these notes now include some useful information that was discussed in the gmane.mail.procmail thread about recipe to add keywords to an imap message.
- 2006 February 21 Whenever I look at this page (or any of my pages), I click on a few random links to see if the links work and to see what's up with people who have contributed to the Procmail community. Today I clicked on Uriel Wittenberg, who I list in the Thanks section below, and learned that “Uriel recently passed away at the age of 48. He had been suffering from lymphoma.” I'm sorry to hear this and wanted to make sure that everyone who is still alive knows that I appreciate very much the great big geeky Procmail community.
- 2006 January 31 In my Deflexion.com blog, I posted a blog item titled Using a MaybeSpam Mailbox, which describes how I deal with my possibly-spam messages. This blog item includes a Sieve script, but you could do the same type of thing in Procmail (e.g., by setting keywords or labels with Procmail).
- 2006 January 15 On this page, in the Warnings
( subsection of Set Up Your Procmail Files for Testing, added another example of a problem caused by not using the Procmail defaults.![[Warning!]](http://www.ii.com/images/warning.gif)
) - 2005 December 9 On this page, in Step by Step Through Setting Up and Testing Procmail, added a Warning to Step 2c about a broken
/etc/procmailrc - 2005 December 6 - September 2 On this page, added four notes about mailbox names, one about the dollar-sign character and exclamation-mark character (
$and!), one about the caret character (^), one about the tilde character (~), and one about dual-use names (aka hybrid folders). - 2005 November 25 As I announced in a blog post titled Turning on Comments or My Own Private Usenet, I have enabled comments in my Deflexion.com blog. Your comments are welcome!
- 2005 November 14-18 In the Procmail mailing list, which is described in the Procmail Discussion Groups section below, there was a thread about new features for procmail.
- 2005 August 25 If you are one of the many people who are switching to Gmail because Gmail now lets users customize the 'From:' address in outgoing mail, you might be interested in the Gmail Tips on my Power Pine page. I just added a tip about how to use Pine to “bounce forward” (redirect) archived messages to Gmail. I discuss how to use Procmail to route incoming mail to Gmail in Forwarding and Plus Addressing below.
- 2005 August 22 There is an interesting discussion in Joseph Scott's blog titled Email Tags, which discusses Procmail, IMAP keywords, and more. I discuss using Procmail to set keywords or labels below.
- 2005 June 18 In a message on the spam tools mailing list, John R. Levine said:
“A friend of mine notes that the primary publishers of Sender-ID [SPF] records are bulk senders: ESPs and spammers. So the no-sender-id [warning in Hotmail] will in practice mean "not spam".”
So, according to John and others, it is probably time to delete the spam-signifying SPF records for your domains (if any such record exists). For more about this, see Microsoft's Hotmail demands Sender-ID, backlash to follow in John's blog and Spammers Continue To Be The Biggest (By Far) Supporters Of Email Authentication at Techdirt. - 2005 May 21 On the Virus Snaggers (vsnag) mailing list, Dallman Ross announced “npd.rc. It has one purpose: stop the neo-Nazi spam spew put out by the Sober.Q worm.
[...] You don't even need to run vsnag to use this.” I discuss vsnag and other ways to deal with viruses in the Snagging Viruses section below. - 2005 January 5 Updated Step by Step Through Setting Up and Testing Procmail so the old Steps 1 and 2 are now Steps 0 and 1; and Step 2 is now about backing up
~/.forward,~/.procmailrc, and the global procmailrc, if they exist. - 2004 December 11 Bart Schaefer posted two excellent messages to the Procmail list, one about virtual domains and one about maildir-format mailboxes vs. Procmail's MAILDIR variable. I have added links to these messages in the relevant sections below and changed “Virtual Domain” to “Virtual-Domain Dropbox” in the title of this section: Important Warning: Procmail Cannot Reliably Route Users' Messages in a Virtual-Domain Dropbox.
- 2004 November 24 Dallman Ross released Virus Snaggers (vsnag) 2.22a. Important: To use vsnag 2.x, you need Procmail 3.15+. I discuss dealing with viruses in the Snagging Viruses section below.
- 2004 November 17 Updated the Procmail Discussion Groups section below so it now includes links to RSS feeds of the Procmail list and many other ways to access the list.
- 2004 November 12 In the Procmail list, Dallman Ross posted a message about the “Future of procmail” from Stephen R. van den Berg, the long lost Procmail creator. In the message, Stephen said “given the apparent state of affairs, please allow for me until this weekend to evaluate the situation at hand. [...] Do not despair, the cavalry will come to the rescue.” Thanks to Sam for bringing up this issue, to Dallman for tracking down Stephen, and to Stephen (and the cavalry!) for coming to the rescue.
- 2004 October 25 Added a section to this page called Setting Keywords or Labels.
- 2004 October 19 In the Procmail list, Sam started a thread about Who is the procmail maintainer? This includes discussion about the location of various Procmail patches and why they have not been incorporated into an official Procmail release.
- 2004 September 22 In the article An analysis of Microsoft's MARID patent applications, John R. Levine says:
“The IETF MARID [MTA Authorization Records in DNS] working group slogged away all summer trying to produce a draft standard about e-mail sender verification. They started with Meng Wong's SPF and Microsoft's Caller ID for E-mail, which got stirred together into a hybrid called Sender ID. One of the issues hanging over the MARID process has been Microsoft's Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) . . .”
If you are interested in the future of email, I recommend that you read the rest of John's article. - 2004 September 21 and August 24 In comp.mail.misc messages titled ANNOUNCE: Procmail Module Library 2004.0921 released (sourceforge) and ANNOUNCE: Procmail Module Library - strategies against spam, Jari Aalto announced that “recently new modules were added to the Procmail Module Library CVS repository to interface some well known Bayesian Statistical Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) prevention programs. [...] Included is a prerelease of the document "Procmail plan for spam" that describes two Procmail based approaches to reducing unwanted mail.” Jari's document includes a section called Bouncing messages do no good, which is in agreement with what I say in the section Rejecting or “Bouncing Back” a Message below.
- 2004 September 7 As announced here, Jason Tishler updated the Cygwin version of Procmail to 3.22-10.
- 2004 July 25 Added a subsection called The Problems With Forwarding to the Forwarding and Plus Addressing section below.
- 2004 July 14 Sean B. Straw, of Professional Software Engineering, posted a message in the procmail list Re: local procmail filtering before using sendmail smarthost, in which he says
“There is a procmail mantra. Please recite it with me:
I recommend that all Procmail users read this message. I've added a link to it in my delicious bookmarks related to Procmail and in the section below called List of Links: “Why Headers Don't Matter” and More.PROCMAIL IS NOT AN MTA.”
- 2004 March 19 Maciej Ceglowski announced that he and Joshua Schachter are working on LOAF, a GPL'd distributed-social-network filter that seems to be a robust and private way to greenlist a correspondent and limelist a correspondent (of a correspondent)n, where n=1,2,3, etc. (aka your first, second, third, etc. degree correspondents). It currently works with Procmail and Pine.
If you use Pine and Procmail, and would like to help find a general solution to the spam problem, I recommend that you try LOAF and participate in its development.![[Del.icio.us icon]](http://www.ii.com/images/del.png "Del.icio.us icon")
I am collecting LOAF-related links at Del.icio.us / Deflexion.com / Messaging / LOAF. - 2004 March 18 Added a tip about “downcasing” the letters in a mailbox name that I recently stumbled upon. This section also discusses forwarding, plus addressing, and automatically assigning a particular label or delivering to a particular mailbox on the target system (the system to which the messages are forwarded). The example target systems are Tuffmail.com and Gmail.com, but these examples can be adapted to many other systems.
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![[Note]](http://www.ii.com/images/note.gif)
25 February 2004: Because of the current batch of viruses, I recommend that you quarantine — but do not auto-delete — all messages that have attachments with a “nasty extension,” including .zip. For details about what the nasty extensions are and how to snag these messages, see the Snagging Viruses section below. - 2004 February 23 Added a subsection called Minimizing False Positives With Greenlists and Bluelists to the Advanced Recipes section on this page.
- 2004 February 12 Inspired by this thread in the Procmail discussion group, I added a section called Generic SBE Sorting to this page. (SBE = Solicited Bulk Email)
- 2004 January 26 There is a new prolific virus named W32/Mydoom@MM, which is also known as W32.Novarg.A@mm. It arrives as an attachment with the file extension .bat, .cmd, .exe, .pif, .scr, or .zip. Make sure that you heed the warnings and read the thread virus recipe for MyDoom in the Procmail discussion group.
- 2004 January 17 and 20 As announced in this and this message, SpamAssassin 2.62 and 2.63 released. SpamAssassin is a popular spam-detection and scoring tool that is often used in conjunction with Procmail and IMAP. I describe how to plug SpamAssassin into Procmail in Using SpamAssassin below.
- 2004 January 14 Added a section called Rejecting or “Bouncing Back” a Message to this page.
- 2004 January 4 Added a section called Deleting a Message to this page.
- 2003 September 23 Dallman Ross announced version 1.3 of his Virus Snaggers. For more about these snaggers, see the next two News items and the Snagging Viruses section below.
- 2003 September 19 Inspired by Dallman Ross's Virus Snaggers (see next News item), I added a section called Snagging Viruses to this page. Thank you Dallman!
- 2003 September 19 Dallman Ross posted a message to the Procmail mailing list that included a link to his “Virus Snaggers” recipes. Dallman's recipes catch W32.Swen.A@mm (aka W32/Gibe-F and W32/Automat-AHB) and many other worms and viruses. As I describe in Snagging Viruses below, I am currently using his recipes and so far they are working very well!
- 2003 September 10 and 3 Added the sections Using a Nesting Block to Optimize the SpamAssassin Recipes and Using SpamAssassin to this page.
- The old Procmail news items that used to be on this page are archived on my Deflexion.com blog on the page called Pre-October-2003 Deflexion & Reflexion from the Procmail Quick Start.
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