UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Originally Posted by zaxxon

You could try forwarding mail to procmail which is a mail filter to make a copy of the mail while the original goes to it's mailbox so you might not get trouble with sendmail cause you don't alter the type of the mail box file. Not sure if it works and procmail get's stuck but maybe worth a try. If it doesn't work, you might want to think about an alternative way like using a special user for those mails and/or using aliases etc.

We use a mechanism like that to split a mail and forward it filtered to different recipients and tools etc. for further processing (in this case munpack, a mime decoder to separate the message from the attachment).
You will need to write a small recipe for procmail which is not hard - there are plenty of How-Tos etc. (Procmail How-To Page).

Here an example:

Push it to procmail:

Code:

$> cat .forward
"|/usr/bin/procmail -f-"

Here is the filter setup:
:0 is the original, :0c are copies...; From and Subject are used as filter; ! in front of the email address means to forward a copy to that user. The pipe hands a copy over to munpack.

Code:

$> cat .procmailrc
MAILDIR=$HOME/in
LOGFILE=$HOME/log/incomming.`date +%y-%m-%d`
 
:0
* ^From.*thisguy@somedom.com
* ^Subject:.*Here comes your latest data
{
        :0c
        ! another.guy@mydom.com
 
        :0
        | /usr/local/bin/munpack
}
 
:0
* ^From.*
/some/tmp/dir

Originally Posted by methyl

Specifically what statistics are you looking for?

1) where is it on my system?

2) do I need to invoke sendmail from the sendmail.mc file?

3) you use a .forward file to invoke sendmail; where should my .forward file be located?
...
I created a .procmailrc file in /etc
I created a .forward file in /var/mail