Re: Can not get a filter recognised for one email source

At 07:10 2011-02-16, N.J. Mann wrote:
>With a regexp of
>   ^From: .*Debra
>it will not match
>   from: [email protected]
>because it is expecting 'from:' followed by one space, followed by one
>'any' character, followed by zero or more 'any' characters,

WRONG.

First, Procmail is case insentitive unless told otherwise (via a 
recipe flag), so, From/from doesn't matter one iota.  It also does 
not "ignore" headers that don't conform to the 
first-character-capitalized format.

Second, the * is a count modifier, which modified the immediatley 
preceeding regexp (in this case, dot, which is a single character 
wildcard): .* means zero or more of any character.  It DOES NOT mean, 
precisely one character, followed by zero or more of 
anything.  Therefore space dot star WILL match a space, or ten 
spaces, or a space followed by a name, or whatever.  It is not the 
same as dot star, because it enforces that the first character must 
be a space.  I don't see this as a problem, though certainly a lot of 
people might choose to omit the space as a requirement, as the colon 
itself is the demarc between the header name and the content 
(exception: the ^from_ line, which uses a space - but then, you'd be 
specifying the space in place of the colon anyway).


OP: I've got to wonder - are these headers perhaps appearing in a 
digest?  So, you're seeing them in the MBX, but they're really not 
standalone messages - there's a true set of headers somewhere above?

---
  Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

  Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
  Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.