The processing and delivery rules are called recipes and there are good sources for these in the man pages (procmail and procmailex), as well as on the web. The rc files can contain environment variable assignments and recipes. The first matching recipe is used to determine the mail delivery. If no recipe matches, the mail is delivered to default.

There are two types of recipes - deliverying recipes and non-delivering recipes. Delivering recipes cause mail to be delivered and processing stops; if a non-delivering recipe is matched, processing continues. Normally non-delivering recipes cause the mail header or body to be written to a file, absorbed by a program or forwarded.

In the rc files:

• Comments start with a #
• Recipes start with a : and have the format:

  :O [flags] [ : [locallockfile] ]
  < zero or more conditions, one per line >
  < exactly one action per line >
        

Flag		Meaning

Some examples are: