Creating and testing a rule

Procmail allows you to organize your rules and recipes into multiple files and then process each file in turn. This makes it much easier to manage the rules and also to switch rules on and off as the needs change. For this first test case, we will create a special rule set for testing and organize all our rules in a subdirectory of our home directory. Typically, the subdirectory is called Procmail but you are free to use your own name.

We will start off by looking at a simple personal rule and testing it for a single user. Later in the chapter, when we have covered all of the basics and you are comfortable with the process of creating and setting up rules, we will show how to start applying rules to all system users.