maildirproc is a program that processes one or several existing mail boxes in the maildir format. maildirproc is primarily focused on mail sorting — i.e., moving, copying, forwarding and deleting mail according to a set of rules.

It can be seen as an alternative to procmail, but instead of being a delivery agent (which wants to be part of the delivery chain), maildirproc only processes already delivered mail.

Installation:

maildirproc has no other dependencies than a working Python 2.4 (or higher) on a Unixish system. No special installation is needed; just copy the maildirproc file to a suitable place and run it.

You can run maildirproc in several diffent ways, e.g.:

- Manually: You could, for example, run

maildirproc --once -r foo.rc -b . -m Maildir

to apply the program in foo.rc once on a maildir directory called Maildir in the current directory.

- By cron: Put a row like

* * * * * maildirproc --once

in your crontab to run maildirproc each minute (using the default RC file ~/.maildirproc/default.rc).

As a long-running process: Just start maildirproc (without the --once flag).

Using some service supervision framework, for example runit.

Here are some key features of "maildirproc":
· It's small. It's just a small Python program that is easy to understand.
· It's robust. If there's a bug that makes the program crash, then nothing happens; the mail will not disappear. And as a consequence of using maildirs, no locks are needed.
· The configuration language is relatively easy yet powerful.
· It's easy to test new configuration. Since maildirproc is not part of the delivery chain, it's just a matter of taking down or disabling the process, modifying the configuration and running maildirproc in test mode. When the new configuration is ready, just start or enable the process again.

What's New in This Release:
· The handling of mail headers was made more robust.
· The mailing list header "Mailing-List" is now recognized.