Procmail: Pipe to Program, Otherwise Return Error to Sender

Question

I'm trying to use procmail to send all messages for a certain domain to RT (Request Tracker). This is more of a question about the .procmailrc file, though.

Here's my current .procmailrc file:

#Preliminaries
SHELL=/bin/sh               #Use the Bourne shell (check your path!)
MAILDIR=${HOME}        #First check what your mail directory is!
LOGFILE=${MAILDIR}/procmail.log
LOG="--- Logging ${LOGFILE} for ${LOGNAME}, "
VERBOSE=yes
MAILDOMAIN='rt.mydomain.com'
RT_MAILGATE="/opt/rt3/bin/rt-mailgate"
RT_URL="http://rt.mydomain.com/"

LOGABSTRACT=all

### Trying to  process using the rt-mailgate script
:0
{
# the following line extracts the recipient from Received-headers.
# Simply using the To: does not work, as tickets are often created
# by sending a CC/BCC to RT
TO=`formail -c -xReceived: |grep $MAILDOMAIN |sed -e 's/.*for *<*\(.*\)>* *;.*$/\1/'`
QUEUE=`echo $TO| $HOME/get_queue.pl`
ACTION=`echo $TO| $HOME/get_action.pl`
:0 h b w 
|/usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE --queue $QUEUE --action $ACTION --url $RT_URL
}


### Upon failure, I want to send back an error message to the user, saying
###   "Queue does not exist." I took this code from the procmailex manpage.
:0 Wh: no-queue.lock
{
## Reply if error
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: noloop@rt.ncom.com
| formail -rD 8192 no-queue.cache

  :0 ehc
  |(formail -rI"Precedence: junk" -A"X-Loop: noloop@rt.mydomain.com" ; \
    echo "The Queue or Action was invalid."; echo "--" \
    ) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t

}

Do you see a problem with my .procmailrc file? It works fine if the queue exists, but after that point, it just sends the mail to /var/mail/username. I want to throw away the email and return an error message.

Answer 1

I haven't used procmail in a while honestly, so I appologize if this doesn't immediately work.

First off, the nesting in the script you had was causing problems because it pretty much cut a recipe in half. They aren't necessary anyway, so I removed them. I also simplified the structure and set it up so it will never fall through to the local mailbox.

#Preliminaries
SHELL=/bin/sh               #Use the Bourne shell (check your path!)
MAILDIR=${HOME}        #First check what your mail directory is!
LOGFILE=${MAILDIR}/procmail.log
LOG="--- Logging ${LOGFILE} for ${LOGNAME}, "
VERBOSE=yes
MAILDOMAIN='\(help\|rt\)\.\(ncom\|networklubbock\)\.com'
RT_MAILGATE="/opt/rt3/bin/rt-mailgate"
RT_URL="http://rt.ncom.com/"

LOGABSTRACT=all

### Trying to  process using the rt-mailgate script
# the following line extracts the recipient from Received-headers.
# Simply using the To: does not work, as tickets are often created
# by sending a CC/BCC to RT
TO=`formail -c -xReceived: |grep $MAILDOMAIN |sed -e 's/.*for *<*\(.*\)>* *;.*$/\1/'`
QUEUE=`echo $TO| $HOME/get_queue.pl`
ACTION=`echo $TO| $HOME/get_action.pl`
:0w 
|/usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE --queue $QUEUE --action $ACTION --url $RT_URL

# the formail command below looks at the message sender and basically
# swallows the message if it's seen the sender before.  The number
# is the size of the cache file of seen addresses.  A lock file is
# used because multiple formail processes editing that cache will
# corrupt it.
:0w:no-queue.lock
| formail -rD 8192 no-queue.cache

### Upon failure, I want to send back an error message to the user, saying
###   "Queue does not exist." I took this code from the procmailex manpage.
# Don't send if this was a bounce from a mailer, and don't send if this
# message contains the header put there to indicate a loop.
:0
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: noloop@rt.ncom.com
|(formail -rI"Precedence: junk" -A"X-Loop: noloop@rt.ncom.com" ; \
  echo "The Queue or Action was invalid."; echo "--" \
  ) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t

# trash anything that falls all the way through.  This should only ever
# happen if the message was a bounce or if it was a loop.
:0
/dev/null

Hope that helps. Please comment if you have questions about any part of it and I'll try to explain. Or figure out how I goofed up if it doesn't work.