Unix is for truly masochistic. Consider my recent adventures of setting up something as trivial as e-mail forwarding. All I wanted is that e-mail delivered to my Unix account was kept locally as well as forwarded to my gmail account (reading e-mail in pine over ssh connection isn't as fun as it sounds). "|exec /usr/bin/procmail || exit 75" $HOME/.procmailrc is: PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin $HOME/.procmail/general.rc is: :0 cIt took me, literally, hours of reading, debugging and trying different variations of this stuff. But that's not everything. Before my battle was over I had to fix two other problems. First, my sendmail uses smsrh i.e. restricted shell, for very noble security reasons. That means that it can't see /usr/bin/procmail in .forward. The fix is simple: cd /etc/smsrhOf course, to arrive at this fix I first had to happen to figure out sendmail's error message from bounced e-mail and google for the exact message to figure out how to fix it. The other problem is that if I didn't have root privileges on this box I wouldn't be able to fix it at all. There was one more thing: it turns out procmail is very picky about file permissions. For good reasons, I'm sure, but it doesn't change the fact that it's another thing I had to figure out from log files and googling. The fix (from http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/qs/#forward): cd $HOME All I wanted is to have my e-mail forwarded. On Exchange-baseds systems all I needed to do was to create a server-side rule using a simple UI interface from within Outlook. |