On [2005-Jan-10] Stan Goodman <sgood@hashkedim.com> wrote:

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SPAMTRAP=mylistspam

No "$" before the name of the variable here? Why?

A programming convention adopted by Stephen when he created procmail and its scripting language. If you look in rc.init and rc.custom you'll see that all variables are defined this way (no $ in the definition, $ preceeds the name for simple substitutions). While in general I agree with Charlie that an email list is not the place to learn basic programming technigues it's not as if the SmartList list is overwhelmed with traffic :-)

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It is written in "procmail" (use man procmail and man formail as a starting point to understand the recipes/instructions in smartlist (smartlist is 'written' in procmail and in sh)

Very compact language. Very little intuitive baggage. Not for the faint of heart.

Lean and fast, the criteria needed when dealing with system-level email and especially back when the program was created -- machines were not as fast as they are now and you couldn't afford slowness when tens of thousands of email messages were going through the processing.

I don't have any files of the form rc.local.rxx (only rc.local.sxx); I assume that I can put the snippet into an otherwise empty one. No header is required?

Take a look in rc.custom near the bottom. This is where the connection is made between the variables like RC_LOCAL_REQUEST_XX and the actual filenames like rc.local.rxx. To actually have rc.submit or rc.request call the rclocal.xxx modules you need to uncomment the appropriate variable in rc.custom. If you look in rc.request you'll see that, if defined, rc.local.r00 is called right after rc.init and rc.custom are called to define all the list's parameters. So everything that is defined in those two modules will be "known" to rc.local.r00 when it executes. Rich