Refiltering Mail
Spamassassin daemon
on my server
had apparently shutdown,
and I hadn’t noticed
until I logged in
to check email and found thousands
of emails in my inbox,
instead of having been properly filtered
for spam.
I cleaned up about 100 messages by hand,
but I quickly realized I didn’t want to do this anymore.
I found a
tip at the Unix StackExchange
suggesting that procmail
could be run again
on each message file
as it sits in the Maildir,
and each would be processed
through spamassassin normally
and redelivered
to the correct mailbox.
To be safe,
I moved all the new mail files
(~/Maildir/new/\*)
to /tmp/mail,
fired up mutt to see them all gone,
and then piped each file into
procmail again:
for x in /tmp/mail/\*; do echo $x; procmail < $x; done
Back in mutt,
I could see mail starting
to appear again in my inbox
and in my spam folders.
When the loop was done,
and I was sure my inbox looked good,
I removed /tmp/mail,
and I was back in business.
Filed Under: Linux