follow up on forwarding

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings,

I posted a question last night regarding using Mail::Audit to have mail placed in a folder directly forward to another email account, using sendmail. Does anyone know how to make a .forward file to only forward mail in a particular folder? Also, how often would this forwarding check for entries in the folder?

thanks much.

Comment on follow up on forwarding

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Re: follow up on forwarding by cianoz (Friar) on Jul 28, 2003 at 08:17 UTC
if you want to use Mail::Audit then the only thing you need to put in .forward is `\| /your/mailauditscript.pl` [download] then using Mail::Audit methods inside your script you can accept() a centain message in a certain folder and/or resend() it to another address Read The Fine (Mail::Audit) Manual .	[reply] [d/l]
Re: follow up on forwarding by DrHyde (Prior) on Jul 28, 2003 at 10:47 UTC
Can't be done using .forward. Another poster has suggested how you should solve your problem. However, if you really do want to drop mail into a folder and have it then be forwarded onwards ... Depending on exactly how your mail is set up, a "folder" will either be a file or a directory. You need to write a program which will run periodically or will be triggered by the write to the file (which would really be a named pipe) to do the mail forwarding. Or use Plan 9, whose funky filesystem would seem to make this easy :-)	[reply]
Re: follow up on forwarding by saintbrie (Scribe) on Jul 28, 2003 at 14:28 UTC
Procmail might serve your needs better, actually, as it allows some greater flexibility. It works like filters for netscape's mail client, but is configured at the server level via a text file in the user's home directory. (And it is a lot easier than it looks). There's a pretty solid tutorial for it here: at infinite ink. Most *nix systems come with procmail installed. I don't know your requirements exactly. How are you getting the mail in a particular folder to that particular folder? Is it possible that that system could forward the mail in addition to sorting it?	[reply]
Re: Re: follow up on forwarding by chanio (Priest) on Jul 29, 2003 at 03:06 UTC
People uses to still call it Sendmail but normally it is Procmail that even acts as if it were Sendmail. Other MTAs might also have a .forward local folder to put a list of addresses to forward if certain rules happen with the incoming email. Those rules might even call certain scripts! Well perl and GNU-Linux are from my point of view, the same family!	[reply]