Procmail Companion

Martin McCarthy

Are you receiving dozens of emails each day? Feeling overwhelmed? Do you want something that will make your life easier? That will separate personal email from work email? Then Procmail Companion will show you how to control your email rather than your email controlling you.

The Book:

Procmail is a program that can automatically process electronic mail. It is small, fast, secure and free! It runs on Unix and Unix-like systems and is growing in popularity. It kicks in after the mail arrives on your machine and before you read the mail. With a few simple sets of instructions, or recipes, Procmail puts all messages from a photography mailing list into one mailbox and all mail from a particular set of friends into another. Emails that tell you how to ‘make money fast’ or asking if you would like ‘to buy a time share’ are thrown away and don’t waste your time. This book provides pain free explanations about how to use and get the most from Procmail. Using case studies, explanations and examples this book will teach new users how to use Procmail and give advanced users tips and tricks on the more esoteric features of Procmail.

Skills you will learn:

• explain the basics of how email systems work

• demonstrate where procmail fits within an email system

• demonstrate how to set up simple mail processing and filtering

• remove the mystery of procmail scoring

• demonstrate how to invoke external processing from within procmail

• explain all the features of procmail regular expressions

• provide a full and detailed reference to procmail syntax, macros, variables and diagnostic messages

Professional Comment

‘I get over 200 pieces of email every day on my work account. I get nearly that many to my home account and to legacy accounts that bounce around the universe prior to landing in some box or other. Procmail is my friend. Procmail filters and sorts my stuff. Martin McCarthy is my friend, too. For Marty has written a book on what Procmail can do and how to use it. If you want to know how Procmail can handle mailing lists, McCarthy tells you. If you want to handle SPAM, McCarthy tells you how. And if you’d like to do these things, but fear that you don’t understand email of the Internet well enough, McCarthy gives you enough of an introduction so that you need not fear any more.

McCarthy’s book had enabled me to put it to other uses. I am really gratified to have read it. You will be gratified too.’

Peter H. Salus (Chief Knowledge Officer at Matrix.Net)

About the Author

Martin McCarthy has been a software engineer for over 15 years working for a variety of organizations, developing systems that range from control of particle accelerators at a high-energy physics laboratory through to intelligence systems used by the police. He was the first chairman of RIPE (European Internet Registry) Test Traffic Working Group and a member of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) IP Performance Metrics Working Group. He is also the co-author, with Alligator Descartes, of Reality Architecture: Building 3D Worlds With Java and VRML (Prentice Hall).

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 4 Ratings

Great Detail - 2002-02-08
Reviewer Rating:
I've been using procmail in a basic way for a number of years. Whilst I've always meant to get around to using some of the more complicated (and useful) tools in the procmail toolbox, I've always been discouraged by the man pages.

This book explained those areas wondefully, and also showed me quite a few possibilities that had never occurred to me.

I think this book would be useful even if you already know procmail pretty well.

It would have got 5 stars, except for a couple of typos (involving quotes) that should have been caught. Mostly excellent!

Just what I needed! - 2004-03-28
Reviewer Rating:
I've been using procmail to filter my email for probably six or seven years, but in spite of reading whatever info I could find online, I was never able to get beyond the basics--until I came upon McCarthy's book. The online info seemed either too simpleminded or (more often) too complex. McCarthy's book has helped me enormously to create more sophisticated filter recipes, to understand what I'm doing, and to identify errors in my coding. I think the book would be helpful both to people new to procmail and to those with lots of experience who are looking to fine-tune what they already know. It's a terrific book!

Finally: Organization & Spam Relief - 2004-01-07
Reviewer Rating:
Unlike prior reviewers, all I could do was spell Unix when I purchased this book-- a desperation measure, to be sure. But trust me, folks, this little beauty is worth every penny and then some. Long story short: About a year ago, I implemented procmail on my website-hosted server. Since then, the email I care about is auto-filed into text files; spam is a past-tense item; and my email box is joyfully mine again. Tip: grab the freebie plain text editor, CrimsonEditor(.com), and activate color-coding so you can SEE what you're doing while fashioning filters. ..... This text is easy to digest, so you'll likely have filters up and testing within a weekend. (P.S. run google searches for "procmail recipes", as you can't "break" anything while trying!)

Very well written - 2003-07-16
Reviewer Rating:
Of course this was the only book available on the topic.
Fortunately this book is written very well, and is a very easy read. ( I finished this book cover to cover in 3 days )
That is not to say that the topic is not covered in depth.
I am an experienced UNIX programmer and would not have minded if the explanations on regular expressions and other UNIXy stuff shorter.
Its really amazing what procmail can do for us to make the life easier.
Its particularly relevant today, as more and more people are turning to Linux for their desktop.

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Internet/Online > E-Mail