procmail & .forward

Tom Needs a Hat Mitchell mitch48 at sbcglobal.net
Thu Feb 19 01:35:05 UTC 2004


On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 06:10:09PM -0500, NSL sysadms wrote:
> can you please tell me what is the significance of the following line in 
> .forward
> 
> 
> "|IFS=' '&&exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- ||exit 75 # username"

Having a procmail line in ~/.forward on FC1 is  most likely a left over from a
previous install or a home dir on another machine.

> i am getting an error
> 
>    ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
> "|IFS=' '&&exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- ||exit 75"
>     (reason: Service unavailable)
>     (expanded from: <username at my-server.com>)

This is a common error when sendmail has procmail enabled in it.
In such a case you should:

   mv ~/.forward ~/.forward-not-needed-here

If your are in doubt about procmail setup move it out of the way 

   mv ~/.procmailrc  ~/.procmailrc-need2check

Now look at the man page for procmail and decide if you need the
services of procmail.

What your ".forward" line was supposed to do is pass all your mail to
procmail for filtering and processing.  Since procmail is hooked up by
"default" (most fedora mail) all you need to do is retest your
.procmailrc file if you had one.

Look at /etc/mail/sendmail.mc and see the line: 
  define(`PROCMAIL_MAILER_PATH',`/usr/bin/procmail')dnl
and others like it.

-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	mitch48-at-sbcglobal-dot-net





More information about the users mailing list