Procmail funnyness...

[John Anderson <cobalt f2s com>]

Hi there, I've been trying to setup procmail to put the Balsa Mailing List
emails into their own mail box...  I still haven't gotten that to work, but
I think I've found a smallish (?) problem with the way mail is filtered
through procmail...  It seems that balsa waits for procmail to be done
before it can do anything else...  I'll explain better...

When I try to download mail with a bad ~/.procmailrc Balsa will log onto my
pop3 server, get mail, and it seems to lock itself into the transaction
state of the pop3 session, because I think it is trying to filter each
message through procmail the second it gets it...  I think that this is bad
behaviour, because what is happening with me is that it is logging into my
pop3 server, getting a message, passing it to procmail, and somewhere in
there either balsa becomes dead, or balsa is not threaded in a way to
handle procmail not returning (at least that's what it seems like).  So
then balsa is locked up it seems, and it won't refresh it's display or
anything, and I have to kill it and start over.  Of course the problem is
that it never closed the transaction with my pop3 server, so I have to wait
for at least 10 minutes (the timeout period on pop3 stuff), before I can
try to get mail again, hoping that I fixed my procmail recipes...  Did all
that make sense?  I hope that my diagnosis of what is happening isn't
totally off...

John Anderson