[vox-tech] program to move message from inbox to folder

[Ken Herron]

--On Wednesday, September 29, 2004 11:29:16 -0700 Charles McLaughlin 
<cmclaughlin at ucdavis.edu> wrote:

> I want to write a shell script to move messages from a mail spool inbox
> to a number of folders.  So if there are messages in the inbox, the
> first message should go to folder1, second message should go to
> folder2, etc.

Your first hurdle is that the mail spool is most likely a single file 
with all of the messages concatenated together; you'll need to split it 
into separate messages. There are a few ways to do this:

1) Don't deliver the mail into the spool file in the first place. Set up 
a .forward file which causes the mail to be piped into some other 
program, such as procmail.

2) Use the formail utility (which comes with procmail) to split the spool 
file into separate messages, which are similarly piped into another 
program.

3) Write a completely custom utility, in perl or python perhaps, which 
can parse the spool into separate messages. I assume this isn't an option 
for you.

Using method 1 or 2, a simple way to get what you want is to pipe the 
messages into procmail and have procmail deliver them into an MH-format 
mailbox. An MH mailbox is a directory where the messages are files with 
sequential numbers for names; this is different from the maildir format. 
Basically, you'd deliver the mail into the MH directory using procmail 
(or formail + procmail), then sweep the directory using a simple shell 
script that moves each file to a mailbox based on the file's number.

So, one way to accomplish this is as follows. First you'd create a 
.forward file in the home directory of the spool file's owner, containing 
the following:

	|procmail

This pipes the user's messages into procmail instead of delivering them 
to the spool file.

You'd also create a directory such as "/home/user/mhinbox" to serve as 
the inbox, and a .procmailrc containing something like this:

	:0
	/home/user/mhinbox/.

This writes each message to a file in the directory, using a sequential 
numeric filename.

Finally, you'd run a script like the following from cron every fifteen 
minutes or whatever:

	#!/bin/bash
	cd /home/user/mhinbox || exit 1

	mbox[0]=/path/to/mbox1
	mbox[1]=/path/to/mbox2
	...
	mboxcount=5

	for file in *
	do
		box=${mbox[$file % mboxcount]}
		# deliver $file into $box
	done
-- 
"Grand Funk Railroad paved the way for Jefferson Airplane, which cleared
the way for Jefferson Starship. The stage was now set for the Alan Parsons
Project, which I believe was some sort of hovercraft." - Homer Simpson

Kenneth Herron     Kenneth.Herron at mci.com     v658-5894     916-569-5894