Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The short answer: I read it out of the spool directory (direct/personal mail) or the folders where Procmail sorts it (mailing lists, LJ messages, etc.) using /usr/bin/mailx or Mutt on both systems; on my ISP .forward clones a copy (before Procmail filtering/sorting) to a file where a cron script on one of my home machines snatches it via FTP.

The long answer: I'm not entirely certain in what order the system procmailrc and my .forward file are applied; I just know that my personal .procmailrc is applied last. In any case, I'm using old-tech tools and not IMAP or POP. But not quite as old as UUCP.

I'm using neither POP nor IMAP, 'cause I haven't gotten around to figuring out how to make the tools with UIs I can stand do what I want with those protocols.

AFAICT, there are three tiers of spam filtering at my ISP, only one of which is opt-in. There's some sort of outer perimiter where they do blacklist blocking, and every so often they misclassify something (and, for example, cut off one of my mailing lists); then there's the system procmailrc on the host where I have a login, which checks for worm/virus signatures and does a little more spam filtering. I specified that I did not want filtering, but apparently that only affects the third tier which I don't know much about.

I have a .forward file that clones my mail to a file that a cron script on my home machine fetches and zeroes every ten minutes using FTP. I'm guessing that the system procmailrc is applied after .forward, because that would explain why I see worms and spam on my home box that I don't see in the spool directory at my ISP.

That cron script breaks up the fetched file with csplit and feeds each message to Procmail for delivery.

My .procmailrc on both machines sorts messages into various folders (Unix-format mail files), putting each mailing list and certain categories of automatic messages into designated folders and leaving anything not covered by a rule in my system mailbox (/var/mail/dglenn at my ISP (SunOS) and /var/spool/mail/dglenn at home (Linux)). Despite the same .procmailrc rules, I wind up with slightly different sorting in the two places; I'm not sure why (different versions of Procmail, perhaps, or interaction between headers and hostname? -- I'll get around to investigating someday).

Whichever system I'm logged into, I read mail using mailx most of the time, and occasionally Mutt (for looking at high-traffic mailing lists threaded, or for unpacking MIME attachments), directly from the spool directory for my personal mail, or using '-f' to read from one of the folders Procmail sorted list mail into.

Messages that make it to my home machine but don't appear at my ISP might be explained by strangeness if the system procmailrc (though it seems kind of random for that); messages that I can see at my ISP but which fail to make it to my home machine seem stranger.

At some point I'm probably going to have to switch to an ISP that doesn't mess with my inbound mail "for my own good" so I'll know that what reaches the MTA reaches a place I have control over, but I'm not looknng forward to changing my email address and my URLs when it comes to that.