This manual page describes the language used by maildrop to filter E-mail messages. The mail filtering instructions are read from a file. The language is loosely structured, it is based on pattern matching. The language has a distinct lexical and syntactical structure, very similar to Perl's, but it is important to note that it is not Perl, and is very different from Perl, in certain cases.
If the filtering instructions do not exist, maildrop delivers the message to the default mailbox without doing any additional processing, making it indistinguishable from the usual mail delivery agent.
It is important to note that maildrop reads and parses the filter file before doing anything. If there are any errors maildrop prints an error message, and terminates with the exit code set to EX_TEMPFAIL. A compliant mail transport agent should re-queue the message for a later delivery attempt. Hopefully, most simple syntax errors will not cause mail to be bounced back if the error is caught and fixed quickly.
maildrop uses variables to access and manipulate messages.
Variables
are arbitrary text accessed by referring to the name of the variable, such as
HOME
, or DEFAULT
.
Text is placed into a variable by
using an assignment statement, such as:
This statement puts the text "IN.junk" (without the quotes) into a variable
whose name is FILE
.
Later, the contents of a variable are accessed by using
the $ symbol and the name for the variable. For example:
This will deliver the current message to the mailbox file (or a maildir directory) named "IN.junk".
maildrop initially creates variables from the environment
variables
of the operating system, UNLESS maildrop runs in delivery mode.
Each
operating system environment variable becomes a maildrop
variable.
When running in delivery mode, maildrop does not import the
environment for security reasons.
In all cases maildrop resets the
following variables to their default values: HOME
,
DEFAULT
, SHELL
,
PATH
, LOCKEXT
,
LOCKREFRESH
, LOCKSLEEP
,
LOCKTIMEOUT
, MAILDIRQUOTA
,
SENDMAIL
and LOGNAME
.
There's one exception to this rule which applies to the version of
maildrop that comes with the Courier Mail
Server. The following
does not apply to the standalone version of maildrop:
when running in
delivery mode, if the -d
flag was not used, or if it specifies
the same userid as the one that's running maildrop,
the following
variables are automatically imported from the environment: HOME
, SHELL
,
LOGNAME
and MAILDIRQUOTA
.
These environment variables are
initialized by Courier prior to running maildrop.
Additionally, the
initial value for the DEFAULT
maildrop variable is imported from
the MAILDROPDEFAULT
environment variable. This is because
Courier overloads the DEFAULT environment variable to store the defaulted
portion of the local mailbox address. See the dot-courier(5) man page in the Courier
distribution. You can grab Courier's DEFAULT
value by
using the
import command.
Note, however, that this will clobber the old
contents of DEFAULT
, which is probably not what you want.
The right way to do this would be something like this:
All internal variables are exported back as environment variables when maildrop runs an external command. Changes to internal variables, made by the filter file, are reflected in the exported environment.
Most whitespace is generally ignored. The # character introduces a comment running to the end of the line, which is also ignored. Unlike other mail filters, maildrop parses the filter file before taking any action with the message. If there are syntax errors in the file, maildrop displays an error message, and returns EX_TEMPFAIL. That should cause the mail message to remain in the queue, and, hopefully allow the problem to be corrected, without bouncing any mail.
NOTE: | In maildrop, the end of line is a lexical token. In order to continue a long statement on the next line, terminate the line with a backslash character. |
Literal text in the maildrop filtering language is surrounded by either single or double quotes. In order to enter a single quote into a text literal surrounded by single quotes, or a double quote into a literal surrounded by double quotes, prefix it with a backslash character. Use two backslash characters characters to enter one backslash character in the text literal.
NOTE: | A backslash followed by either a backslash, or a matching quote, is the only situation where the backslash character is actually removed, leaving only the following character in the actual text literal. If a backslash character is followed by any other character, the backslash is NOT removed. |
Multiple text literals in a row are automatically concatenated, even if they use different quotes. For example:
This sets the variable FOOBAR
to the text "Foobar".
Variable substitution is performed on text literals that's surrounded by double quotation marks. The "$" character, followed by a variable name, is replaced by that variable's contents.
This sets the variable MAILBOX
to the contents of the
variable
HOME
followed by "/Mailbox".
Variable names must begin with an
uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, or an underscore.
Following that, all
letters, digits, and underscores are taken as a variable name, and its
contents replace the $ sign, and the variable name. It is possible to access
variables whose name includes other characters, by using braces as
follows:
Inserts the contents of the HOME-WORD
variable. If the
variable
does not exist, the empty text literal is used to replace the variable name.
It is not possible to access variables whose names include the }
character.
If the $ character is not followed by a left brace, letter, or an underscore, the $ character remains unmolested in the text literal. A backslash followed by the $ character results in a $ character in the text literal, without doing any variable substitution.
Variable substitution is not done in text literals which are surrounded by single quotes (apostrophes).
maildrop initializes special variables:
$1
, $2
, and so on, with
additional parameters specified on the maildrop
command line. A filter file
may use those variables just like any other variables.
The following variables are automatically defined by maildrop. The default values for the following variables may be changed by the system administrator. For security reasons, the values of the following variables are always reset to their default values, and are never imported from the environment:
DEFAULT
The default mailbox to deliver the message to. If the filter file does not indicate a mailbox to deliver this message to, the message is delivered to this mailbox. The default mailbox is defined by the system administrator.
FROM
Message envelope sender. This is usually the same
address as what appears in the From: header, but may
not be.
This information may or may not be available to maildrop on your
system. The message envelope sender is usually specified with the -f
option to maildrop. If the -f
option is not given, maildrop
looks for the From_ line in the message. As the last resort,
FROM defaults to the userid which invoked maildrop.
Note that FROM
may be empty - the message envelope sender is
empty for bounce messages.
HOME
Home directory of the user running maildrop.
HOSTNAME
Network name of the machine running maildrop. Obtained from gethostname(3).
LOCKEXT
Extension for dot-lock files (default: .lock).
LOCKREFRESH
Refresh interval, in seconds, for dot-locks (default: 15). When maildrop dot-locks a mailbox, maildrop tries to refresh the lock periodically in order to keep other programs from removing a stale dot-lock. This is only required if a dot-lock exists for a prolonged period of time, which should be discouraged anyway.
LOCKSLEEP
Number of seconds to wait to try again to create a dot-lock file, if one already exists (default: 5).
LOCKTIMEOUT
Number of seconds to wait before removing a
stale dot-lock file (default: 60). If a dot-lock file still exists after
LOCKTIMEOUT
seconds, maildrop assumes that the
process holding the lock no longer exists, and the dot-lock file can be
safely removed. After removing the dot-lock file, maildrop waits
LOCKSLEEP
seconds before trying to create its own dot-lock
file, in order to avoid a race condition with another process which is
also trying to remove the same stale dot-lock, at the same time.
LOGNAME
Name of the user to who the message is being delivered.
MAILDROP_OLD_REGEXP
Revert to using the old legacy pattern matching engine.
Versions of maildrop prior to version 2.0
(included in the Courier Mail Server 0.51, and
earlier), used a built-in pattern matching engine, instead of using the
PCRE
library (see the
"Patterns"
section).
maildrop 1.x used a different syntax for patterns, which
is no longer described in this manual page.
The old pattern matching engine is still available, by
setting MAILDROP_OLD_REGEXP
to "1".
Setting this variable will use the legacy pattern matching engine for the
rest of the maildrop recipe file.
The pattern matching engine will be removed completely in a future version
of maildrop.
This setting provides for a transitional period of converting old recipes.
MAILDROP_OLD_REGEXP
can be set to "1" in
the global maildroprc file, then reset to "0"
in each individual maildrop recipe file, after it gets
converted to the new syntax.
MAILFILTER
This is the name of the original filter file that was given to maildrop on the command line. This is mostly usefull to -default filter files, it allows them to obtain the value of the -M option specified on the command line.
PATH
Command execution path. maildrop resets PATH to the system default (usually /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin).
SENDMAIL
The mail delivery agent.
When maildrop is
instructed to deliver the message to a mailbox whose name begins with the
! character, this is interpreted as a request to forward the message. The
SENDMAIL
command is executed to forward the message.
SHELL
The login shell. The shell is used to execute all commands invoked by maildrop.
VERBOSE
Current Debug level (default: 0). Setting VERBOSE
to
progressive higher values, between 1 and 9, produces debugging output on
standard error. maildrop ignores
the VERBOSE
variable in delivery
mode (in order not to confuse the mail transport agent).
UMASK
The file creation mode mask, in octal. The default setting of 077 creates mailboxes that are readable and writable by the owner only. Use 007 to create mailboxes that are readable/writable by both owner and the group. Use 037 to create mailboxes that are readable by both owner and group, but writable by owner only. Permissions on existing mailboxes are not changed, this setting affects only new mailboxes. When delivering to maildirs this setting sets the permissions on new messages only. Access permissions on messages in maildirs are also affected by the permissions on the maildir directories.
The following variables are automatically used by maildrop when the filter file is being processed:
EXITCODE
Return code for maildrop. When
maildrop successfully delivers a message, it terminates with this
exit code, which defaults to 0. When the to or the
cc command is used to deliver the message to an external
process, via a pipe, maildrop will set this variable to the exit
code of the external process. Since maildrop immediately
terminates after completing the to command this means that
maildrop's exit code will be the exit code of the external
process. If the to command does not deliver the message to a
process you must set EXITCODE
before the to
command, since maildrop terminates immediately after finishing the
delivery.
KEYWORDS
The KEYWORDS
variable is used only when delivering a
message to a maildir, and implements the optional IMAP keyword extension
as implemented in the
Courier-IMAP.
It may be optionally initialized to contain a comma-separate list of keywords.
The to, or the
cc command, delivers the message
to the maildir normally, but also associated the list of keywords in
KEYWORDS
with the newly delivered message.
KEYWORDS
must be set before the message is delivered to
a maildir.
The contents of KEYWORDS
are ignored, when delivering on
an mbox folder.
LINES
Number of lines in the current message. Note that this may be an approximation. It may or may not take into account the -A option, or any mbox "From_" lines. Use this as criteria for filtering, nothing more.
MAILDIRQUOTA
Set this variable in order to manually enforce a maximum size on ANY maildir where the message is delivered. This is an optional feature that must be enabled by the system administrator, see maildirquota(8) for more information.
RETURNCODE
This variable is set when maildrop
runs the xfilter command, or a command that's
specified within a pair of backtick characters ( command substitution ).
The RETURNCODE
variable will be set to the exit code of the
command, after it completes.
SIZE
Number of bytes in the message. This may or may not include the -A option, and the mbox From_ line. Use this as a criteria for filtering, nothing more.
All text strings in filter files should be in single, or double quotes. However, for convenience sake, quotes can be omitted under certain circumstances.
Text that includes ONLY letters, digits, and the following characters: _-.:/${}@ may appear without quotes. Note that this does not allow spaces, or backslashes to be entered, however the text is still variable-substituted, and the substituted text may contain other characters.
Also, note that patterns (see below) begin with the slash character. Normally, anything that begins with the slash is interpreted as a pattern. However, text immediately after "VARIABLE=" is interpreted as a string even if it begins with a slash. This is why something like:
works as expected. Using quotes, though, is highly recommended. You must use quotes to set a variable to a lone slash, because an unquoted slash is interpreted as a division sign.
Long double or singly-quoted text can be broken across multiple lines by ending the line with a lone backslash character, like this:
The backslash, the newline, and all leading whitespace on the next line is removed, resulting in "This is a long text string".
Text enclosed in back-tick characters is interpreted as a shell command. The shell command is executed as a child process by maildrop. Its output is used in place of the command. For example:
places the names of the files in the current directory into the DIR variable.
The output of the command will have all newline characters replaced by spaces, and leading and trailing spaces will be stripped (multiple spaces are not removed, though). Also, the contents of the message being delivered is made available to the command on standard input.
The pattern syntax in maildrop is similar to the grep command's syntax, with some minor differences. A pattern takes the following form in the filter file:
pattern specifies the text to look for in the message. pattern must not begin with a space, otherwise the leading slash will then be interpreted as a division sign. If you must search for text that starts with a space, use something like "/[ ] ... /".
The general syntax of maildrop's patterns is described in the pcrepattern(3) manual page, with certain exceptions noted below. maildrop uses the PCRE library to implement pattern matching. Not all features in PCRE are available in maildrop, and the "options" part, which follows the pattern specification, changes the pattern matching further. Consult the pcrepattern(3) manual page for more information, but note the following exceptions:
UTF-8 string matching is not presently supported.
Internal options settings are not supported (but see the "D" maildrop option, below). Do not include option settings in the pattern, doing so will lead to undefined results.
Named subpatterns are not implemented. Numbered subpatterns are implemented, see "Pattern Match Results", below.
Following /pattern/, there may be an optional colon, followed by one. or more options. The following options may be specified in any order:
Match this pattern against the message header.
Match this pattern against the message body.
This is a case sensitive match. Normally the patterns match either uppercase or lowercase text. /john/ will match "John", "john", or "JOHN". Specify the D option for a case-sensitive search: lowercase letters in the pattern must match lowercase letters in the message; ditto for uppercase.
If neither 'h' or 'b' is specified, the pattern is matched against the header only. Specifying the 'b' option causes the pattern to be matched against the message body. Specifying both causes the pattern to be matched against the entire message.
Normally, each line in the message gets matched against the pattern individually. When applying patterns to a header, multi-line headers (headers split on several lines by beginning each continuation line with whitespace) are silently combined into a single line, before the pattern is applied.
Patterns are evaluated by maildrop as any other numerical expression. If a pattern is found, maildrop's filter interprets the results of the pattern match as number 1, or true, for filtering purposes. If a pattern is not found the results of the pattern search is zero. Once a pattern is found, the search stops. Second, and subsequent occurrences of the same pattern are NOT searched for.
maildrop can also do weighted scoring. In weighted scoring, multiple occurrences of the same pattern are used to calculate a numerical score.
To use a weighted search, specify the pattern as follows:
where xxx and yyy are two numbers. yyy is optional -- it will default to 1, if missing.
The first occurrence of the pattern is evaluated as xxx. The second occurrence of the pattern is evaluated as xxx*yyy, the third as xxx*yyy*yyy, etc... All occurrences of the pattern are added up to calculate the final score.
NOTE: | maildrop does not recognize multiple occurrences of the same pattern in the same line. Multiple occurences of the same pattern in one line count as one occurence. |
After a pattern is successfully matched, the actual text that is matched
is placed in the MATCH
variable. For example:
matches a line of the form:
Here the variable MATCH
will be set to "From:
postmaster@localhost", which can be used in subsequent statements.
If the pattern contains subpatterns, the portions of the text that match
the first subpattern is placed in the MATCH1
variable.
The second subpattern, if any, is placed in MATCH2
, and
so on:
matched against the same line will set
MATCH
to
"From: postmaster@localhost",
MATCH1
to "postmaster", and
MATCH2
to "localhost".
Of course, in real world the "From:" header is usually much
more complicated, and can't be handled that easily.
This is just an illustrative example.NOTE: | Subpatterns are not processed in the foreach statement. |
Although the new PCRE-based pattern matching code in maildrop is completely different from the built-in pattern matching code in maildrop 1.x, very few changes will be required to convert recipes to the new syntax. The only major differences are:
The subexpression format has changed.
Any pattern that uses subexpression needs to be converted.
Additionally, references to MATCH2
must be replaced
with MATCH1
, MATCH3
to
MATCH2
, and so on.
References to plain old MATCH
will remain the
same.
The "w" pattern option is no longer possible, with PCRE. The very few recipes that use this option, if any actually exist, will have to be rewritten in some other fashion.
Although maildrop evaluates expressions numerically, results of expressions are stored as text literals. When necessary, text literals are converted to numbers, then the results of a mathematical operation is converted back into a text literal.
The following operators carry their usual meaning, and are listed in order from lowest precedence, to the highest:
Assigns the result of the expression to VARIABLE (note no leading $ in front of variable).
NOTE: | If VARIABLE is NOT surrounded by quotes, then it may contain only letters, numbers, underscores, dashes, and a selected few other characters. In order to initialize a variable whose name contains non-standard punctuation marks, surround the name of the variable with quotes. |
The cc statement is very similar to the to statement, except that after delivering the message maildrop continues to process the filter file, unlike the to statement which immediately terminates maildrop after the delivery is complete. Essentially, the message is carbon copied to the given mailbox, and may be delivered again to another mailbox by another cc or to statement.
See the to statement for more
details.
When
cc is used to deliver a message to a process
maildrop
will set the EXITCODE
variable to the process's exit
code.
maildrop automatically creates a lock when a message is delivered to a mailbox. Depending upon your system configuration, maildrop will use either dot-locks, or the flock() system call.
The dotlock statement creates an explicit dot-lock file. Use the flock statement to create an explicit flock() lock.
The expression is a filename that should be used as a lock file. maildrop creates the indicated dot-lock, executes the filtering instructions contained within the { ... } block, and removes the lock. The expression must be the name of the dot-lock file itself, NOT the name of the mailbox file you want to lock.
NOTE: | With manual locking, it is possible to deadlock multiple maildrop processes (or any other processes that try to claim the same locks). No deadlock detection is possible with dot-locks, and since maildrop automatically refreshes all of its dot-locks regularly, they will never go stale. You'll have maildrop processes hanging in limbo, until their watchdog timers go off, aborting the mail delivery. |
maildrop will print the given text. This is usually used when maildrop runs in embedded mode, but can be used for debugging purposes. Normally, a newline is printed after the text. If text is terminated with a \c, no newline will be printed.
The exception statement traps errors that would normally cause maildrop to terminate. If a fatal error is encountered anywhere within the block of statements enclosed by the exception clause, execution will resume immediately following the exception clause.
The exit statement immediately terminates filtering.
maildrop's
return code is set to the value of the EXITCODE
variable.
Normally, maildrop terminates immediately after successfully delivering the message to a mailbox. The
exit statement causes maildrop to
terminate without delivering the message anywhere.
The exit statement is usually used when maildrop runs in embedded mode, when message delivery instructions are not allowed.
maildrop automatically creates a lock when a message is delivered to a mailbox. Depending upon your system configuration, maildrop will use either dot-locks, or the flock() system call.
The flock statement creates a manual flock() lock. Use the dotlock statement to create a manual dot-lock file.
The expression is the name of the file that should be locked. maildrop creates the lock on the indicated file, executes the filtering instructions contained within the { ... } block, and removes the lock.
NOTE: | With manual locking, it is possible to deadlock multiple maildrop processes (or any other processes that try to claim the same locks). The operating system will automatically break flock() deadlocks. When that happens, one of the maildrop processes will terminate immediately. Use the exception statement in order to trap this exception condition, and execute an alternative set of filtering instructions. |
The foreach statement executes a block of statements for
each
occurrence of the given pattern in the given message, or expression. On every
iteration MATCH
variable will be set to the matched string.
All the usual options may be applied to the pattern match,
EXCEPT the following:
Weighted scoring is meaningless, in this context.
Subpatterns are not processed.
Only the MATCH
variable will be set for each found
pattern.
Conditional execution. If expression evaluates to a logical true (note - parenthesis are required) then the first set of statements is executed. The else keyword, and the subsequent statements, are optional. If present, and the expression evaluates to a logical false, the else part is executed.
maildrop evaluates all expression as text strings. In the context of a logical expression, an empty string, or the number 0 constitutes a logical false value, anything else is a logical true value.
If the if part, or the else part consists of only one statement, the braces may be omitted.
NOTE: | The grammar of this if statement is stricter than usual. If you get baffling syntax errors from maildrop, make sure that the braces, and the if statement, appear on separate lines. Specifically: the closing parenthesis, the closing braces, and the else statement, must be at the end of the line (comments are allowed), and there may not be any blank lines in between (not even ones containing comments only). |
When maildrop starts,
it normally imports the contents of the
environment variables, and assigns them to internal maildrop
variables. For example, if there was an environment variable
FOO
, the internal maildrop variable
FOO
will
have the contents of the environment variable.
From then on, FOO
will be no different than any other variable,
and when maildrop runs
an external command, the contents of maildrop's
variables will be
exported as the environment for the command.
Certain variables, like HOME
and
PATH
, are always reset to fixed defaults,
for security reasons.
Also, in delivery and embedded modes, the environment is not imported at all,
and maildrop starts with only the fixed default
variables.
The import statement initializes the specified variable with the contents of the original environment variable when maildrop started. For example:
This results in the following output:
This shows that when maildrop starts
PATH
is set to the fixed default of
/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin.
However, the original contents of
the PATH
environment variable we different, and the
import statement shows what it was.
The include statement reads a file, and executes filtering instructions contained in that file. Note that the include statement is processed when the current filter file is being executed. When maildrop reads the initial filter file, any syntax errors in the filtering instructions are immediately reported, and maildrop will terminate with a return code of EX_TEMPFAIL. Any errors in files specified by include statements are NOT reported, because those files will not be read until the include statement is itself executed.
If the specified file does not exist, or if there are any syntax errors in the file, maildrop reports the error, and terminates with a return code of EX_TEMPFAIL.
Logging in maildrop is normally turned off. The logfile statement specifies the file where maildrop will log how the message has been disposed of. The parameter is then name of the file. If the file exists maildrop appends to the file.
For each delivery (the to and cc statements, and default deliveries) maildrop records the From: and the Subject: fields, together with the current time, in the log file.
The log statement adds additional logging text to the log file. The log statement works exactly like the echo statement, except that the text is written to the logfile, instead of standard output.
The to statement delivers the message to a mailbox. expression must evaluate to a valid mailbox. A valid mailbox is either a mailbox file, a maildir, or an external program (which includes forwarding to another address).
The to statement is the final delivery statement.
maildrop
delivers message, then immediately terminates,
with its return code set to
the EXITCODE
variable.
If there was an error while
delivering the message, maildrop terminates with the
EX_TEMPFAIL exit code. A properly-written mail
transport agent
should re-queue the message, and re-attempt delivery at some later time.
An expression that begins with the
"|" character
specifies an external program to run to handle the actual
delivery. The SHELL
variable specifies the shell to
execute the
given command. The message is provided to the command on standard input.
maildrop's exit code will be the process's exit
code.
An expression that begins
with an exclamation mark, "!"
specifies a whitespace-delimited
list of E-mail addresses to forward the message
to.
The program
specified by the SENDMAIL
variable is run as an
external program, with the list of E-mail addresses provided as parameters to
the program.
Otherwise, expression names the mailbox where maildrop delivers the message. If expression is a directory, maildrop assumes that the directory is a maildir directory. Otherwise, maildrop will deliver the message to a file, formatted in traditional mailbox format. maildrop will use either dot-locking, or flock()-locking when delivering the message to the file.
The expression is repeatedly evaluated. Each time it evaluates to a logical true, the statements inside the braces are executed. When expression evaluates to a logical false, the while loop is over. Take care to avoid infinite loops.
expression specifies an external program that maildrop runs to filter the current message. The current message will be piped to the filter program as standard input. The output of the filter program replaces the current message being delivered. The external program must terminate with an exit code of 0. If the external program does not terminate with an exit code of 0, or if it does not read the message from the standard input, maildrop terminates with an exit code of EX_TEMPFAIL.
If expression1 evaluates to a logical true, the result of the || is expression1, otherwise it's expression2, which is evaluated.
maildrop uses the following concept of true/false: an empty text literal, or a text literal that consists of the single character "0" is a logical false value. Anything else is a logical true value.
If expression1 evaluates to a logical false, the result of the && is expression1, otherwise it's expression2, which is evaluated.
maildrop uses the following concept of true/false: an empty text literal, or a text literal that consists of the single character "0" is a logical false value. Anything else is a logical true value.
These operators compare their left hand side expression against their right hand side. These operators compare the numerical values of each side, as floating point numbers. If the numbers compare as indicated, the result of the comparison is the text string "1", otherwise it is the text string 0.
NOTE: | Ccomparisons are not associative: "a < b < c" is an error. If it is absolutely necessary, use "(a < b) < c". |
These operators compare their left hand side expression against their right hand side. These operators compare each side as text strings (alphabetically, although the text may include anything). If the text strings compare as indicated, the result of the comparison is the text string "1", otherwise it is the text string 0.
NOTE: | Comparisons are not associative: "a lt b lt c" is an error. If it is absolutely necessary, use "(a lt b) lt c". (But why would you?). |
This is the bitwise or operator. Its result is a 32 bit integer, which is a bitwise-or combination of the left hand side and the right hand side.
This is the bitwise and operator. Its result is a 32 bit integer, which is a bitwise-and combination of the left hand side and the right hand side.
The left hand side of the =~ operator can be any expression. The right hand side is always a pattern specification. The result of the operator is the weighted match of the pattern against expression (if the options do not specify weighted scoring, the result is simply 1 if the pattern was found, 0 if not).
See "Patterns" for more information.
The result of this operator is the weighted match of the pattern against the current message (if the options do not specify weighted scoring, the result is simply 1 if the pattern was found, 0 if not).
See "Patterns" for more information.
The result of the ! operator is a logical opposite of its right hand side expression. If the right hand side expression evaluated to a logical true, the result is a logical false. If it evaluated to a logical false, the result is a logical true.
maildrop uses the following concept of true/false: an empty text literal, or a text literal that consists of the single character "0" is a logical false value. Anything else is a logical true value.
The result of the ~ operator is a bitwise complement of its right hand side expression. The right hand side expression is evaluated as a 32 bit integer, and the result of this operator is a bitwise complement of the result.
The escape function returns its sole argument with every occurrence of a special character prefixed by a backslash. A special character is any of the following characters:
This can used when matching pattern sections, and then taking one section and matching it again. For example:
This example checks if the contents of the From: header can also be found in the Subject: header. If the escape function were not used, then any special characters in the From: header that are also used in regular expressions, such as * or +, would introduce unpredictable behavior, most likely a syntax error.
The reason why this list of special characters also includes characters not used in maildrop's regular expressions is to allow maildrop's variables to be used on the command line of a shell command executed by the xfilter command, backtick characters, or to or cc commands.
Although using data from an external data source is dangerous, and it may result in inadvertent exploits, using the escape function should hopefully result in fewer surprises.
These functions provide support for GDBM database files. See maildropgdbm(5) for more information.
NOTE: | The system administrator can disable GDBM support in maildrop, so these commands may not be available to you. |
This function is usually applied to a header that contains RFC 2822 addresses. It extracts the actual addresses from the header, without any comments or extraneous punctuation. Each address is followed by a newline character. For example, if string contains:
The result of the getaddr function is the following string:
NOTE: | Because getaddr() interprets RFC 2822 loosely, it is not necessary to strip off the "To:" or the "Cc:" header from the string, before feeding it to getaddr(). For example, the following snippet of code takes all addresses in the message, and concatenates them into a single string, separated by spaces: |
NOTE: | In certain rare situations, RFC 2822 allows spaces to be included in E-mail addresses, so this example is just educational. |
"string" is of the form user@domain. The hasaddr function returns 1 if this address is included in any To:, Cc:, Resent-To:, or Resent-Cc:, header in the message, otherwise this function returns 0.
This is more than just a simple text search. Each header is parsed according to RFC822. Addresses found in the header are extracted, ignoring all comments and names. The remaining addresses are checked, and if "string" is one of them, hasaddr returns 1, otherwise it returns 0.
The comparison is case-insensitive. This actually violates RFC822 (and several others) a little bit, because the user part of the address may be (but is not required to be) case sensitive.
expr is any expression. filename is a name of a file containing a list of patterns. Note that filename is relative to the current directory, which is the home directory of the user when maildrop runs in delivery mode, or embedded mode. maildrop then reads the file. Blank lines will be ignored, as well as any lines that begin with the # character (comments).
Leading whitespace (but not trailing whitespace, take care) is removed, and the remaining contents of each line are interpreted as a pattern which is matched against expr. As soon as the match is found, lookup returns "1". If no match is found after reading the entire file, lookup returns "0". For example:
The file badto.dat contains the following two lines:
If a message has a To: header that contains the text "friend@public", or does not contain at least one @ character, then the message will be silently dropped on the floor ( maildrop will terminate without delivering the message anywhere).
options are the pattern matching options to use. The only supported option is "D" (the rest are meaningless, in this case).
NOTE: | Be careful with discarding messages like that. Pattern matching can be tricky, and a slight miscalculation can cause mail to be unintentionally discarded. It is much desirable to first deliver message to a separate folder or mailbox, and once the filter is verified to work correctly, change it so the messages are discarded completely. |
The substr function takes start number of characters from string. If count is specified, at most count characters starting at position start are kept, any excess is trimmed.
The time function returns the current time, in seconds, since January 1, 1970. This function is useful when using GDBM files. See maildropex(7) for an example of using the time function.
The filter file is read by maildrop ($HOME/.mailfilter or another file), and it contains filtering statements, one per line. The filtering language used by maildrop has a loosely - defined grammatical structure.
Statements are listed one per line. Multiple statements may be listed on the same line by separating them with semicolons. To continue a long statement on the next line, terminate the line with a backslash character.
If getaddr() or hasaddr() functions are used on broken headers, the results are unpredictable.
hasaddr() is completely case insensitive. This actually violates a few RFCs, because the userid portion of the address could be case-sensitive, but it's not in too many cases, so there.
lockmail(1), maildrop(1), maildropgdbm(5), maildirquota(8), reformail(1), egrep(1), sendmail(8).