Today I made the wonderful discovery that gnome.org email was
working fine, and that my attempts to subscribe to the
f-spot-list were
successful – at least, as far as sending me the request for
confirmation makes it a successful transaction. Trouble is, procmail
had been deciding for some time now to deliver certain mail to the
wrong spot.
The short of it is this: if the \/ match command includes some
whitespace in $MATCH, then procmail will treat something like this:
:0
.list.$MATCH/
as two targets, and skip the second part. For example, with the above
recipe, a $MATCH of ’ f-spot-list'
will end up telling procmail to deliver to thw two words .list. f-spot-list/, and
will then tell you that it is skipping f-spot-list/ and delivering to
.list.. However, in the process, procmail has seen the / at the
end of the line and decided to remove the From_ magic from the start
of the message when it is delivered to the mbox .list., and so
you’ll end up with not only a new mbox that you didn’t want, but also
one with a single message in it containing what you’d expect to be
many messages.
So, first fix procmail to match out the whitespace before using the
$MATCH variable, this is just sensible sanitising.
Second, move your broken mbox out of the way, so that we don’t
duplicate mail when you inevitably break this process in a moment.
Create a scratch directory, and cd into it.
% mkdir scratchmonkey
% cd scratchmonkey
% csplit ~/borken.mbox '/^Return-Path/' '{*}'
You want to make sure that the first line of your broken mbox messages
are actually Return-Path: headers, otherwise adjust to suit. You
also want to be doing this on a single message, so if you’ve got an
mbox with correct message delimiters in it, first move them to the
right place (formail -s procmail < ~/borken.mbox then find where the
uber message got delivered, and move it out of the Maildir).
Now you’ve got a directory full of single files. There are now three
ways to deliver them. If you like manual labour and also like to
cheat death by breaking Maildir delivery protocol, you can just move
these files to your inbox Maildir/new directory.
If you want safe delivery, but still like manual labour, try
safecat:
% for i in xx*; do safecat Maildir/tmp Maildir/new < $i; done
If you’re certain your procmail is now correct, let it take care of
the safe delivery and also the filtering job:
% for i in xx*; do procmail < $i; done
Check your mail, all the messages from the busted mailbox should now
be safely stowed and visible to your MUA.