I've been using fetchmail for a couple of years to get mail from the
mail server to my local machine. But it had one disadvantage: it meant
that I had to have postfix (or a similar large and complex MTA)
configured and running on every machine I use, even the lightweight
laptop.
I run procmail to filter my mail into folders -- Linuxchix mail into
one folder, GIMP mailing lists into another, and so forth -- and it
seemed like it ought to be possible for fetchmail to call procmail
directly, without going through postfix.
I found several suggestions on the web -- for instance,
fetchmail-procmail-sendmail
-- but they didn't work for me. fetchmail downloaded each message, passed
it to procmail, and procmail appended it to the relevant mailbox
without the appropriate "From " header that mail programs
need to tell when each new message starts.
Finally, on a tip from bma on #linuxchix and after a little
experimentation, I added this line to ~/.fetchmailrc:
mda /usr/bin/procmail -f %F -m /home/username/.procmailrc
Works great! And it's a lot faster than going through postfix.
Tags: linux, mail, fetchmail, procmail
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14:07 Dec 15, 2009
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During a server backup, Dave complained that my .spamassasin directory
was taking up 87Mb. I had to agree, that seemed a bit excessive.
The only two large files were auto-whitelist at 42M and bayes_seen at 41M.
Apparently these never get pruned by spamassassin.
Unfortunately, these are binary files, so you can't just edit them
and remove the early stuff, and spamassassin doesn't seem to have any
documentation on how to prune their data files.
A thread on the Spamassassin Users list on
managing
Spamassassin data says it's okay to delete bayes_seen
and it will be regenerated.
For pruning auto-whitelist, that same post suggests a program called
check-whitelist that is only available in a spamassassin source tarball
-- it's not installed as part of distro packages. Run this with
--clean.
But a search on the spamassassin.com wiki turns up an entry on
AutoWhitelist
that says you should use tools/sa-awlUtil instead (it doesn't
say how to run it or where to get it -- presumably download a source
tarball and then RTFSC -- read the source code?)
Really, I'm not sure auto whitelisting is such a good idea anyway,
especially auto whitelist entries from several years ago,
so I opted for a simpler solution: removing the auto-whitelist file
at the same time that I removed bayes_seen. Indeed, both files were
immediately generated as new mail came in, but they were now much smaller.
I've run for a few weeks since doing that, and I'm not noticing any
difference in either the number of false positives or false
negatives. (Both are, unfortuantely, large enough to be noticable,
but that was true before the change as well.)
Tags: spam, spamassassin, email
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19:38 May 07, 2009
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