[TriLUG] more spamassassin, procmail

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 14:40, Turnpike Man wrote:
> These are the coolest!  Thanks Corey!  I've tested the level 10 and 7, and I
> will test the trilug at abcdefg.etc as soon as I apply this from my test server to
> my production!
> 
> Question: As I learned from Jeremy, the :0 IS different than :0:, meaning that
> without the trailing colon, the file does not go into a locked state.  For
> example, he suggested that if I did use a /dev/null destination, that
> particular recipe (is that what we are calling these) should not have the
> trailing colon.  I suppose for other mail folders, this would be ok??  Why or
> why not use the trailing colon?  I see Corey here did not use at all.
> 

If you don't use the trailing colon on an "mbox" format file (the
default, traditional Unix mailbox format), you could end up with big
problems if multiple instances of procmail try to write to the folder at
the same time.  (Or if your MUA tries to write to it while procmail also
does.)  The :0: tells it to lock the file, so that nothing else can
write to it while procmail does.  (It releases the lock when it's done.)

You don't need the colon for recipes that don't involve mbox files, like
the $DELIVERTO macro when using procmail on TriLUG, or sending mail
through a pipe to spamassassin, or to /dev/null, etc.

--Jeremy

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| Jeremy Portzer       jeremyp at pobox.com       trilug.org/~jeremy     |
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