By: Douglas J. Hunley

Everywhere I've asked, they said it couldn't be done. But I figured it
out and I'm gonna share it with you all. I manged to get a working
configuration such that my mail is processed by procmail and then passed
to Netscape Messenger. Here's how:

NOTE: My system has sendmail configurd to use procmail as the local
delivery agent. this is not the default for caldera, so you will
probably need a .forward file that sends everything to procmail.

1. create a shell script called /usr/local/bin/bogus_mail

2. edit this script to contain:

#!/bin/sh
# This is a dummy script for Netscape to work
# with procmail
exit 0

a. goto Mail server

b. add/modify the default to use movemail

c. on the 'General' tab of the movemail properties,make sure 'Automatically download new' is ON

d. on the 'Movemail' tab of the movemail properties make sure 'Use an external application' is ON and point it to /usr/local/bin/bogus_mail

5. Write your .procmailrc file however you like, but for all DELIVERING
rules, have the mail delivered to $HOME/nsmail/.netscape.mail-recovery

That's it. This exploits a feature in netscape that nobody seems to know
about. When using movemail, netscape always checks to see if
.netscape.mail-recovery exists (which it creates if it crashes while
doing a movemail operation) and if so, it loads the file as if it were a
normal mail file. So, We can trick Netscape by having a fake movemail
script that does nothing, and then adding to the recovery file. I've had
this hack working on my machine for over a month now verifying that it
worked as expected. I can say that it does what it's supposed to (and I
get typically 600 -700 unique emails a day through this system).

Enjoy everyone!
 

Douglas J. Hunley (Linux User #174778)
<http://hunley.homeip.net/> <http://hunley.epinions.com/>
<http://www.thesatorieffect.com/>
 

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