[ale] Procmail question..

[mic at mathcs.emory.edu (Michelangelo Grigni)]

Jim writes:
> Does anyone have a procmail recipe to purge old email.  For instance, I
> would like to setup procmail so that I only keep the last two weeks of ALE
> email I get.

procmail has no builtin date arithmetic, and I don't know
of a pure procmail solution for this.

Other solutions exist: vm (under emacs), perl, sh, gawk,
and mush (its pick command). See:
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/ (point 29.2)
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1996-09/msg00141.html

Maybe mutt or gnus can do this too, I'm not sure.

I just use vm.  Emacs can run in batch mode, although it
would be inconvenient (vm wants an absolute expiry date).

Another issue: which date do you trust?  I occasionally
receive mail with outrageous or unreadable "Date" fields.
The local sendmail date (in the first "Received" header)
may be more reliable, but I think all the above solutions
just use "Date".