Well, IDE maybe not...but now that I've got your attention, here's a useful shell recipe to debug procmail rule files:

export RULEFILE=./not-bd.rc export OUTPUT_FOLDER=/tmp/mailout export TEST_MSG=/tmp/notbd procmail \ DEFAULT=$OUTPUT_FOLDER \ VERBOSE=yes \ $RULEFILE \ < $TEST_MSG cat $OUTPUT_FOLDER/$(ls -rt $OUTPUT_FOLDER | tail -1)

This runs procmail on the specified file, outputs debugging information and displays the resulting message:

procmail: [10561] Sat Oct 20 12:14:11 2007 procmail: Assigning "MAILDIR=." procmail: Rcfile: "./not-bd.rc" procmail: Match on ! "^To.*bdelacretaz@" procmail: Assigning "MATCH=" procmail: Matched " here's a mail to admin" procmail: Match on "^Subject:\/.*" procmail: Executing " formail -I "Subject: [NOTBD-codeconsult.ch] $MATCH"" procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER=/tmp/mailout/msg.T7An" procmail: Opening "/tmp/mailout/msg.T7An" procmail: Acquiring kernel-lock From machin@truc Sat Oct 20 12:14:11 2007 Subject: [NOTBD-codeconsult.ch] here's a mail to admin Folder: /tmp/mailout/msg.T7An 171

$ cat $OUTPUT_FOLDER/$(ls -rt $OUTPUT_FOLDER | tail -1) From machin@truc Sat Oct 20 12:14:11 2007 From: machin@truc To: admin@codeconsult.ch Subject: [NOTBD-codeconsult.ch] here's a mail to admin

This is not a mail message

My goal was to add a marker in message subjects, for mail that's not addressed to "bdelacretaz" on my domain. Here's the recipe that I came up with (keeping in mind that I'm no procmail guru, YMMV):

:0 { :0 fhw *! ^To.*bdelacretaz@ * ^Subject:\/.* | formail -I "Subject: [NOTBD-codeconsult.ch] $MATCH" }

I'll keep that for a while to check that I get no important mail at the catch-all address that I should have killed long ago...funny how much of my spam has the NOTBD marker now ;-)

See also Debugging Procmail Recipes: Some Tips, where I found about the procmail debugging flags - that page has much more detailed information.

Picture: kevinrosseel@morguefile