filtering - How to?

[Fernan Aguero <fernan iib unsam edu ar>]

Balseros:

I would like to filter my incoming mail. Can you point me to
tutorials/guides on how to do this? Here's my setup:

mail account at a remote POP server
I'm also using a remote SMTP server
I do have a local email account that i barely use, and also a local SMTP
server.

my mail is at ~/mail and i have several subfolders there, like
~/mail/personal, ~/mail/lists, ~/mail/journals, etc.

I'm somewhat confused with the following part of my setup. When i set up
Balsa for the first time i told it to look for mail in
/var/spool/mail/fernan, which is where (i think) my local mail should
be. I also told Balsa to read email from my remote POP server. However
if i look into /var/spool/mail/fernan i can see the messages that i
received from my remote server?!?!?!? Also, in ~/mail i have no inbox,
so i suppose that balsa is using /var/spool/mail/fernan as the InBox.
Is this setup right? Or did i make it wrong?

I ask this because my first attempt at using procmail failed. I tried to
use procmail to filter incoming messages on my local account, and thus
put a rule on ~/.procmailrc:

:0:
* ^Subject:.*HOT
spam.hot

Am i doing something wrong with procmail? Or is it something about my
setup?

Thanks in advance,

Fernan

PS: if you can point me to some how to or guide I'll appreciate it. I
have already read some docs about setting procmail, but some
newbie-oriented stuff would be probably more helpful.