[PROCMAIL][LONG] Allowing multiple lines for one recipe

Procmail version = v3.22 2001/09/10
O/S = Fedora Core 3
Editor = vim

Hello all,

I have a working procmailrc which contains a recipe which I would like to
expand upon, preferrably to two or three lines for the same condition.

It is a personal project of mine, which was started simply to help me learn
a bit more about procmailrc.

What I'm working on is a basic profanity filter. It searches the body of
every email for specific words, and if a match is obtained, formail adds an
'X-Profanity: Yes' header line. A following recipe looks for this particular
header, and if found it tells formail to prepend [PROFANITY] to the subject
line of the mail in question. This is probably not the best way to do it,
but it's working, albeit with one main problem discussed further on.

My reasoning for using a body match rather than a header (e.g Subject:)
match is that it would be rather obvious if profane words were in the
subject line as I would immediately see them upon firing up my MUA. I use
Pine so I don't know if there's any naughty stuff written in the actual
message until I open it, as it has no preview window thankfully.

Here are the relevant parts of my procmailrc as far as I know. (Profane words
modified to avoid offence) :

#!/bin/sh

SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject:`



# Additional custom header written if *any* message body arguments match.
# Using '|' to mean 'OR'.

:0f
* B ?? .*\|\*|\|\*|\|\|\\\
|\
| /usr/bin/formail -A "X-Profanity: Yes"


# Prepend '[PROFANITY]' to subject line if above filter matches.

:0f
* ^X-Profanity: Yes
| /usr/bin/formail -I Subject:"[PROFANITY]$SUBJECT"


I realise my matching expressions are rubbish, and could be made more
efficient by better use of regexps. I just wanted to get something up and
running with two or three lines of words to match, and then start to
fine-tune the procmailrc as I learn more about regexp's as far as procmail
is concerned. Therein lies the heart of my question to you all.

You will notice the '\\' at the end of the condition line. I am trying to
make procmail carry on to the next line '|\' as if it were all one
line. I've done something wrong as the test word 'pop' never seems to be
used. I've been searching for the right character to signify 'newline'.
Sorry for sounding so thick, but is this simply a press of the 'Return' key
? I feel a bit like someone asking "Where is the 'any-key' ?"

I just don't know what to add, as all my variations have failed.

I did find this very helpful page during my searches :

http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/qs/

Most of my other searches referenced 'non-newline', and not 'this is a
newline character, right here noob !'. (My Google skills could do with a
refresher course I guess.)

I admit I am rushing through it, simply trying to find a way to have two or
more lines for the same condition. How do I do that ? Is it '\\' ? Sorry
but I don't understand the meaning of the '/n[y]oo'li:n' part of the
definition of newline, here :

http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?newline

When I press CTL and J, I don't get any characters at all in my procmailrc.
I know I'm sounding like a prat, but I've just got to get this working, it's
driving me mad.

Thanks for your time all.

TB.

Re: [PROCMAIL][LONG] Allowing multiple lines for one recipe

On 2005-04-24, Thick bloke wrote:
> Procmail version = v3.22 2001/09/10
> O/S = Fedora Core 3
> Editor = vim
>
> Hello all,
>
> What I'm working on is a basic profanity filter. It searches the body of
> every email for specific words, and if a match is obtained, formail adds
> an 'X-Profanity: Yes' header line. A following recipe looks for this
> particular header, and if found it tells formail to prepend [PROFANITY] to
> the subject line of the mail in question.

Posting a question to newsgroups immediately makes you find the correct
answer on another search or edit. Damn it.

For those interested, here is the modified procmailrc mentioned in my first post
on this subject, with *working* continuation backslashes this time.


#!/bin/sh

SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject:`



# Additional custom header written if *any* message body arguments match.
# Using '|' to mean 'OR'.

:0f
* B ?? .*\|\*|\|\*|\|\|\\\
\|\
| /usr/bin/formail -A "X-Profanity: Yes"


# Prepend '[PROFANITY]' to subject line if above filter matches.

:0f
* ^X-Profanity: Yes
| /usr/bin/formail -I Subject:"[PROFANITY]$SUBJECT"


The word-match recipe now has not only \\, but a third \ at the start of the
newline, continuing on the condition. That's all it was as far as I can
tell. I now get [PROFANITY] in the subject line of mails with the *test
word* 'pop' in them. Sorted.

Thanks to this page :

http://www.linuxmanpages.com/man5/procmailrc.5.php

In particular, this paragraph :

"Don't put comments on the regular expression condition lines in a recipe,
these lines are fed to the internal egrep literally (except for
*continuation backslashes* at the end of a line)."

After reading this, I experimented and found the solution.

Apologies to those who may've replied already for wasting your time.

TB.