At 2:41 PM -0500 11/5/01, Andrew J Sands is rumored to have typed:

1. I plan to install and run SmartList from a RH7.1 box, the instructions indicate that I required both the source for procmail and smartlist. As the aforementioned box already has procmail/sendmail installed by RPM do I have to remove them? (rpm -e) before d/l and installing smartlist??

I'm not a strong proponent of RPMs, since they sometimes make things funky, and prefer to install from source tarballs, but if SmartList is installed as well, why install it again? If it isn't installed, you can either uninstall/reinstall procmail, or even simpler just install a _second_ installation. I used to have two seperate install of procmail/SmartList under two seperate users while using /usr/bin/procmail to deliver mail on the box, so installing a second, perhaps different version while another is installed really isn't a problem.

2. As it is more economical for me to be secondary MX behind my ISP, can I use mail names (aliases) which they allow me to set-up and then filter by local procmail to drive smartlist. i.e. my.listname@domain.name/my.listname-request@domain.name would be mapped to actual.user.list.name@domain.name, then would it be possible for a .procmail to filter on the "To: " field.

I wouldn't use the To: header field, rather the TO macro, but yeah, that's easily accomplished. In my production environment, I do NOT use the aliases file to pipe the mail to flist as suggested by SmartList, but rather map the addresses to the slist user (that's the user that owns ALL of the mailing lists on the server) in virtusertable. That is: maillist1@domain.tld slist maillist1-request@domain.tld slist maillist2@domain.tld slist maillist2-request@domain.tld slist ...ad nausium. Then the slist user has its own .procmailrc which sorts the mail, allowing me to pull suspicious mail out before flist gets ahold of it, and piping the result to flist <maillist name>. This is NOT the recommended method, but I find it affords considerably more listserver-global AND list-specific control over the mail without having to constantly screw around with rc.local.sxx and INCLUDERCed files. I think of slist as a "real" user, with his own little .procmailrc file, just instead of sorting to mail folders he sorts to flist. (Your mileage may vary. Close cover before striking.) Charlie