The colon line can carry a lot more information than just a single colon. This is probably the hardest part of Procmail to learn because the flags are single-letter options -- sometimes with no meaningful mnemonic -- although they can have a quite significant impact on what a recipe actually does.

Here are some useful flags:

B

Match against the body of the message instead of the headers.

HB or BH

Match against both the headers and the body.

D

Case is significant when matching. (Default is don't care. Mail headers can be mixed case according to RFC822 so normally you shoot yourself in the foot if you treat case as significant.)

c

Clone: Even if this recipe is a delivering one, continue processing as if the message was still undelivered.

This is the key to doing more than one thing to a message.

f

Modify ("filter") the message and continue processing with the modified version. (This is "filtering" because you can run filtering pipelines like tr A-Z a-z to turn all text into lowercase, for example.) This obviously cannot be a delivering recipe.

Note that some of these are uppercase while others are lowercase. The b flag does something else than the B flag.

You get a brief listing of all the flags with procmail -h at the Unix prompt.

laku19.adsl.netsonic.fi/era/mail/procmail-presentation.html#flags↑

[ Procmail ] - [ 2.3 procmailrc ]



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