[Esd-l] Is there an "idiot's guide to setting up the sanitizer"?

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Friday, October 25, 2002 12:38 PM -0700 John Lang
<johnl at oregonisonline.net> wrote:

> I am quite inexperienced with procmail.  I've only been running my linux
> server with sendmail for about a year or so.  I'm looking for a step by
> step guide for installing the sanitizer and getting it up and running.

I'd recommend taking a half hour to read through the procmail man pages. It
looks like a lot but once you get your head around it it's not so bad.

The procmail "language" has basically 3 elements: variables (which are just
environment variables), rules, and actions (INCLUDERC is the important one
here).

Most of the complexity is in understanding the rule syntax. There's an
option line (the thing that starts with ":0"), the patterns to match, and
some actions to perform. You can use braces to group multiple actions, and
you can nest rules inside of a rule's action set.

The Sanitizer is included from your system-wide /etc/procmailrc using
INCLUDERC. You set up its parameters as environment variables in the
procmailrc file before including the Sanitizer. You can optionally wrap the
Sanitizer invocation in a top-level rule so it only gets invoked on
messages matching some pattern.

You can install the Sanitizer files anywhere, and just put the path in your
INCLUDERC invocation. By convention, these go in an /etc subdirectory,
typically named /etc/procmail.d or similar.

(This is all still relatively fresh in my mind as I just started using
procmail for server-side filtering of my mail. Combined with IMAP access
and some server-side address book, this allows me to mix and match mail
clients without having to carry a lot of customization from client host to
host.)