[H-GEN] Procmail testing

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:

> Yes, I think I advocated a test account myself -- and it's the
> only way to test stuff that could easily see you losing actual
> email that you wanted if you make some little mistake.

This really, really demonstrably did not work for me a few weeks ago.
I was doing a little work to whitelist addresses to save on CPU time
and improve bogofilter's filtering[1].  I created and tested the rule
on my own account by using formail to redeliver messages; it worked
fine.

However I noticed that procmail was reporting it wasn't able to
determine a lockfile, so I added one:

   :0c:bogo
   * ^Reply-To:\ ACLUOnline at aclu\.org|\
     ^From:.*action at dcaclu\.org|\
     ^X-BeenThere:.*@lists\.humbug\.org\.au|\
     ^TO_majordom@([^.]+\.)?humbug|\
     ^List-(Post|Help|Unsubscribe):\ .+|\
     ^X-BeenThere:\ sssc at BigMeanie\.NET|\
     ^Reply-To:\ cabal at cnoturtle\.com
   | bogofilter -n

This worked fine for me, so I implemented it for another user on the
same system---big mistake.  It started failing---bogofilter or
procmail (I don't remember which, but I think it was procmail) started
failing to get a lock, stalling for an hour and then bouncing mail to
senders.

Pissed off?  You bet.  I still have no idea how a rule that worked
appeared to work perfectly well failed to work so spectacularly for a
user with *much* less stringent requirements.

Suggestions welcome, procmailrc available on request.

jason

[1] : Anything with recognizable list headers gets whitelisted,
      basically; there are a few other tests but the exact nature
      isn't important.
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