PMS - (Perl Mail Sorter) - v1.0.0

PMS Homepage : http://www.communityprojects.org/linux/projects/pms/

Introduction

PMS is a mail sorter written in perl. Designed to provide the same basic features of procmail (i.e. sorting incoming mail into specified mailboxes), it provides a more "basic" approach to this task. The config file is more human readable, and does not provide as much of the advanced features that procmail does, which helps to keep simple tasks simple. The main purpose of this program is to provide and quick & easy way to get your mail filtered when you don't have any use for the power, and complexity, of procmail.

Installation

There isn't much to installing PMS, though I figure'd I go over some information that might be usefull.

Typically, the pms executable should go in /usr/local/bin, however if sendmail is set up secure, there might be a specified directory that sendmail is allowed to run programs from, and no other directory. The directory is usually something like /etc/smrsh/ or /usr/lib/sm.bin/ depending on your distro & configuration. If this is the case you will need to either put pms in this directory, or just make a symlink from /usr/local/bin/pms to the sendmail secure directory (recomended).

You will need to make a .pmsrc in your home directory, a sample rc file should be included in this tar file, it's called sample.pmsrc. You should make a copy of this, name it .pmsrc and set up your filtering rules. When you are sure everything is correct in the config file, and it is in your home directory named .pmsrc, edit your .forward and put in the following:

"| /usr/local/bin/pms"

If your sendmail is set up how I mentioned in the above paragraph, then you should replace /usr/local/bin with the path to your sendmail secure directory.

Now all incoming mail gets piped through pms which reads your .pmsrc and attempts to match the patterns as you specify, if it makes a match, it will put the email message in the file you specified.

If the filtering does not appear to be working, you might want to try the debug feature, which is documented in the next section.

Command Line Parameters:

PMS is emant to be run from the .forward, and so there are few command line options. Here are the ones currently used:

-d <number: 1|2> (Activate debuging and set the debug level)

This parameter tells PMS to start logging debug messages into the $debug_file which is specified in the pms executible. A global config file is planned for the major release of v1.0. If you do not specify a number, which indicates the debug level, it defaults to 1.

Debug level 1 explains major steps in the program. What it's doing, looking for, patterns it found and didn't find, etc. It writes this info into $debug_file (Default: ~/.pms-debug).

Debug level 2 does all that level 1 does, with more detail, and it writes the message it gets to $debug_mesgs (Default: ~/.pms-debug-mesgs), so you have a better chance at not missing mail if there was to be some bug that shows up.

RC File: ~/.pmsrc

         syntax:  :$
                  <H|B><,value| >='<value>'
                  <path & filename to append message to>

    :$                  = Begin new chunk (manditory)
    <H|B>               = look in 'H'eader or 'B'ody
    <,value| >          = if 'H'eader then ',<value>' is the header name.
                          if 'B'ody then no value (i.e. B = '<value>')

NOTE: Special keys (i.e. don't use except for where specified): =

EXAMPLES

      :$
      H,From='mygirlfriend@host.com'
      /home/nick/mail/gf-mail

      :$
      B='FREE'
      /dev/null

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PMS by Nick Jennings : nick@namodn.com
Please emai me with questions, comments, etc.