Nix Bits

I’d done this a long time ago and pretty much forgotton all about it. I’ve used procmail for a long time to pre-sort all my mailing list mail among other tasks. I also use it as a mechanism to distribute my gpg public key. If you send me a message with the subject “get key”, you’ll get a response containing my public key in ASCII format. Here’s a snippet from my .procmailrc:

  VERBOSE=off
  PATH=$HOME:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/bin:.
  MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail      # You'd better make sure it exists
  DEFAULT=/var/mail/scotth
  LOGFILE=$HOME/Mail/from
  LOCKFILE=$HOME/.lockfile
  SENDMAIL=/usr/sbin/sendmail

  :0 Wh: msgid.lock   # get's rid of duplicates
  | formail -D 8192 msgid.cache

  # Autoresponder
  :0i
  * !^Subject:.*Re:
  * !^FROM_DAEMON
  * ^Subject:.*get key
  | (formail -r -A "From: scotth@scottharney.com" ; cat $HOME/.pubkey.asc)\
      | $SENDMAIL -oi -t

  # SpamAssassin 
  :0:
  * ^X-Spam-Status: Yes.*
  $MAILDIR/junk

  # mailing list inet-access
  :0:
  * TO.*inet-access
  $MAILDIR/inet-access

If you just need an autoresponder, you’d just use formail in a .forward. Here’s how I do it using a mail server running qmail. Just create
~/alias/.qmail-autorespond containing the following text

| (/usr/local/bin/formail -r -A "From: autorespond@yourdomain.com" ;\
   cat /var/qmail/alias/autoresond.txt) | qmail-inject

Put your autoresponce email body in /var/qmail/alias/autorespond.txt. The ‘qmail-inject’ is qmail’s way of saying ‘/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t’.