19.4.2.2. Flags

Flags are essential to determine how or if a recipe's conditions are compared to a message. The egrep utility is used internally for matching of the conditions. The following flags are commonly used:
  • A — Specifies that this recipe is only used if the previous recipe without an A or a flag also matched this message.
  • a — Specifies that this recipe is only used if the previous recipe with an A or a flag also matched this message and was successfully completed.
  • B — Parses the body of the message and looks for matching conditions.
  • b — Uses the body in any resulting action, such as writing the message to a file or forwarding it. This is the default behavior.
  • c — Generates a carbon copy of the email. This is useful with delivering recipes, since the required action can be performed on the message and a copy of the message can continue being processed in the rc files.
  • D — Makes the egrep comparison case-sensitive. By default, the comparison process is not case-sensitive.
  • E — While similar to the A flag, the conditions in the recipe are only compared to the message if the immediately preceding recipe without an E flag did not match. This is comparable to an else action.
  • e — The recipe is compared to the message only if the action specified in the immediately preceding recipe fails.
  • f — Uses the pipe as a filter.
  • H — Parses the header of the message and looks for matching conditions. This is the default behavior.
  • h — Uses the header in a resulting action. This is the default behavior.
  • w — Tells Procmail to wait for the specified filter or program to finish, and reports whether or not it was successful before considering the message filtered.
  • W — Is identical to w except that "Program failure" messages are suppressed.
For a detailed list of additional flags, see the procmailrc man page.