[Dovecot] procmail vs. maildrop (was: Maildir, procmail, and locks)

[Matthias Andree]

Mark Nienberg <gmane at tippingmar.com> writes:

> Thanks.  I'll study it a bit more and then test it.  I get the
> impression that maildrop is being maintained more actively than procmail
> so changing now (before my new dovecot server goes into production)
> might be a good idea.

Definitely. procmail hasn't been touched since the now almost
five-year-old v3.22 release. OTOH, the procmail maintainer is happy with
the way it works with the fallthrough-behavior; and has to date always
responded very quickly when I Cc:d him on some issue.

I recently discovered one thing that procmail does that maildrop can't.
(CC'ing Sam Varshavchik on this one): procmail can deliver the same
message to several users from the command line. I don't currently know a
way do to that with maildrop without copying the message to a temporary
file and running maildrop twice. Not that it matters often, the question
usually crops up on the fetchmail list when people don't want to install
a fully-fledged MTA.

# procmail -d foo bar
-> delivers the message from stdin first to the user foo and to the user bar

# maildrop -d foo bar
-> delivers to the user foo and sets the variable $1 to "bar".

-- 
Matthias Andree