Using Procmail to Notify Senders of a Change of Address

Here is a procmail recipe that auto-responds to email messages addressed to an email address that is going to be removed. It's totally simple, it just avoids looping and auto-responding to mail daemons. This can just go at the end of your .procmailrc file (in your home directory).

Basically, the lines starting with * are the conditions so it reads do not match FROM_DAEMON, FROM_MAILER or our X-Loop headers, and only take messages addressed To: (including CC:) . Then the line starting with | is the action which is to use formail to send a reply, insert our X-Loop header then use a file (or two in this case) for the message body.

The one thing to point out is that if you want to setup this reply for many email addresses at once just put a | between them. This is a "regex" pattern so you can do fancier matching criteria if you want.

# bounce messages addressed to archangel@uro.mine.nu
:0
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^FROM_MAILER
* !^X-Loop: email-dsn
* ^TO_(archangel@uro.mine.nu)
| (formail -rt -A"Precendence: junk (autoreply)"\
-A"X-Loop: email-dsn" ; \
cat $HOME/.procmail/change-of-address.txt $HOME/.signature) | $SENDMAIL -t