[CentOS] The case of the missing mail

Bart Schaefer barton.schaefer at gmail.com
Thu Dec 23 18:40:43 UTC 2010


On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 23 December 2010 16:53:22 Bart Schaefer wrote:
>> LASTFOLDER is informational, procmail sets it immediately before
>> delivering to that folder; if you see LASTFOLDER in your logs, the
>> only way the message should fail to arrive in that folder is in the
>> event of an error writing to that folder.
>>
> They do arrive there - it just defines it as /var/mail/anne, which is useless
> on my IMAP server.

Sure, but the point is that assigning to LASTFOLDER yourself is meaningless.

Procmail will fall back on the folder named in $ORGMAIL in the event
that it is unable to deliver to $DEFAULT, for example because of a
locking issue.  It's quite likely that this assignment to LASTFOLDER
is coming from ORGMAIL.

> In fact I misquoted when I first wrote.  The line I gave is correct, but it
> should have been followed by
> DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/new/

I'm pretty sure that's wrong.  From the procmailrc manual:

       If the mailbox name ends in "/", then this directory
       is presumed to be a maildir folder; i.e.,  procmail  will  deliver  the
       message  to  a  file  in a subdirectory named "tmp" and rename it to be
       inside a subdirectory named "new".

So you should not have the "new/" on the end of the DEFAULT value
unless you want a folder that is *named* "new" (and thus file paths
ending in new/new/ and new/cur/ etc.)

> In fact my logs show no mail going to /var/mail/anne today, so I will have to
> watch and wait.  I repeat, I'm using a procmailrc that has worked perfectly
> for years.

Unfortunately that it "worked" doesn't always mean that it is correct,
it just means you haven't hit the corner cases before.

>> If you haven't already, you really should add
>>
>> LOGABSTRACT=all
>> VERBOSE=yes
>>
> When I first set this up it was with a printed set of documentation.  I do
> have VERBOSE=YES, but I have LOGABSTRACT=YES.  Are these equivalents or has
> something changed in the meantime?

Again from the manual pages:

       LOGABSTRACT Just before procmail exits  it  logs  an  abstract  of  the
                   delivered message in $LOGFILE showing the `From ' and
                   `Subject:' fields of the header, what folder it
finally went to
                   and  how  long (in bytes) the message was.  By setting this
                   variable to `no',  generation  of  this  abstract  is  sup-
                   pressed.   If  you  set  it  to `all', procmail will log an
                   abstract for every successful  delivering  recipe  it  pro-
                   cesses.

So "all" includes some cases that "yes" does not, particularly copies
made with the "c" flag on recipes.



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