Coming back into the fold (first step, email)… what’s the new procmail?

Background: back in the day you could run procmail as a daemon, it would get and sort your email for you using your rules. Then you could use eMacs as a front end (maybe only gnus in those days). Tl;dr: there seem to be some new email setups that seems cool (mu4e, notmuch, etc), and online videos for setup. But I don’t see anyone sorting/filtering email on arrive… more search the giant db ala gmail. Surely I’m just missing something? (I’d like my setup to work across Mac and windows) Thanks for any info.

I think the new procmail is Sieve these days. I'm not sure I never used procmail.

Also look at maildrop from the Courier project: [Maildrop](http://www.courier-mta.org/maildrop/) It can be deployed by itself - you don’t need to install any other Courier programs if you don’t want to.

Procmail still exists and works just fine last time I ran it. It even had a release this year: https://github.com/BuGlessRB/procmail/releases/tag/v3.24

I still use procmail. I've been using it for nearly two decades, and it still works great for me.

It seems like nowadays nobody cares about "sorting" emails. mu4e and notmuch (and a lot of alternatives) are "fully search base". Luckily it is easy to emulate "sorting" with "saved search patterns". In addition "tagging" seems to be a thing. Personally I can not think of any use-case for "tagging" but still it exists.

Tagging is useful, it's just organising things into folders, except mail can appear in multiple folders at once. I remember an old mail program that used softlinking for this, though the name escapes me. They are also useful for providing search exceptions, so you can search for all emails related to banking, except those I tag as being offers/perks. You could wrangle it with some regex, but tags add a bit of manually-added reliability. Plus you can combine and negate tags with and/or/not.

Unsolicited advice: if you ever get roped into a lawsuit and/or are part of the “discovery” process you will not appreciate having a repository of 20 years of random communication to deal with. Keep what’s worth keeping, let everything transitory just delete on a 60 day timer.

Works on windows and Mac?? (Without me doing a makefile dance of death?). That would be pretty swell.

Don't know. I haven't tried on either of those platforms. I imagine you can `brew install` it on Mac, though.

I'm unfortunately frequently involved in lawsuits (landlord trouble). I find that I am extremely happy I have saved everything and have a good search and threading function. You never know in advance what information will be needed in the future.

I'm still using some legacy procmail rules for stuff I'm pulling from one old account via pop3, and also do some mail splitting in gnus (mostly based on bbdb) - but majority of mail splitting needs just went away by no longer using mailservers I don't control myself: all my mailservers support plus addressing, and filter mail based on that on arrival. As pretty much everybody gets a unique address from me there's almost no need for additional filtering.