Re: How to control the email file name procmail produces

In message <[email protected]>,
	Yue Wu ([email protected]) wrote:
> 
> I'm using fetchmail and procmail to do my emails fetching and
> processing.
> 
> I let procmail process the emails from fetchmail and divides them into
> dirs(maildir), I find the file name is something like:
> 
>     1286938757.42024_0.fbsd.t60.cpu:2,S

There is no :2,S in the name of the file procmail writes to the relevant
'new' subdirectory.  It is your MUA which adds that when it marks the
file as read when it moves it from the 'new' subdirectory to the 'cur'
subdirectory.  This moving and renaming is all part of the Maildir
standard.  Changing may break you MUA and/or other mail handling
programmes.

(I did a test with Mutt, which I see you also use.  When I used it to
read a message which I changed the filename of from xxxx:2,S to xxxx_2,S
it, Mutt, renamed it xxxx_2,S:2,S.)

> it works fine in *nix. But someday when I want to move the dirs onto a
> fat32 filesystem, I failed and I found the reason is that the files
> name has some inlegal characters, maybe : or ,?

A hang over from MS-DOS and, I think, CP/M.  It may have even predated
that, but I am not that old! :-)

You could try using a different mail box system, e.g. mbox or MH.
Although MH is not as good as Maildir it is one message per file.  And,
Mutt does know how to use it.


Cheers,
       Nick.
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