Configuring Mail Delivery and Email Filters
From Syscore
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Online Configuration Interface
The preferred way to configure mail filtering options is through our administration portal.
You can read the Helpdesk's documentation on filtering with our administration portal below:
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Custom Filtering Tips and Tricks
- Keep in mind while creating filters through our administration portal that the web interface is a graphical front end to Procmail; what this means for you is that certain characters have special meaning: "!#($)%^[*]{|}". You should probably avoid using these in the Filter fields, as the results may be unexpected.
- If you are comfortable editing system files by hand, and you require a more advanced configuration, then continue on to Manual Configuration.
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Manual Configuration
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Configuring Your Mail Delivery and Filtering
It is possible to configure your account automatically sort your mail, or discard unwanted mail, via our local delivery agent, procmail. For general information on procmail, you may wish to visit these URLs:
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Local Configuration Notes
Please keep in mind, when reading these pieces of externally developed documentation, that some local configurations have been made to procmail in response to certain ease-of-use, security, and performance concerns.
- Procmail is the local delivery agent. It is unnecessary, as noted in some documentation, to place procmail in your ".forward" file, and in some instances, it will not work.
- Processing of ".forward" files has been disabled.
- Delivery to "applications" is restricted Due to security and performance concerns for the mail delivery machines, delivery from procmail to "pipes" is restricted to specific applications. Currently, these are:
- procmail - yes, you can recursively deliver to procmail
- filter - the elm filtering program
- vacation - for responding to vacation messages
- formail - for altering message headers
- Procmail cannot read or write to files outside of your Mail directory. Also, for security and data integrity issues, procmail will refuse to access files outside of your home volume. By default, the access controls on your home volume only allow the delivery system to access your Mail directory.
- It is unnessary to set MAILDIR or DEFAULT in your .procmailrc. Though most procmail documentation refers to setting these variables, rest assured that the UMBC mail delivery system sets these correctly by default to your Mail directory, and you Mail/inbox folder respectively. Do not set these unless you really know what you're doing.
