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Author: dvalin
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: [DNG] Procmail on beowulf omits mbox separator

The new beowulf 3.0.0 is nifty nice, but I'm foxed by procmailfailing
to prepend an mbox separator to each delivered email,something which
has been standard behaviour for decades,and essential for reading an
mbox format mailbox.
Invoking procmail in fetchmailrc via the mda option:
$ more .fetchmailrc
# Configuration created Sat Mar 27 22:14:20 2021 by fetchmailconf 1.58
set logfile "/tmp/fetchmail_log"
set postmaster "erik"
set bouncemail
set no spambounce
set softbounce
set properties ""
set daemon 600
poll mail.internode.on.net with proto POP3
       user 'dvalin' there is 'erik' here options ssl fetchall
mda /usr/bin/procmail

#      Testing:
#      user 'dvalin' there is 'erik' here options ssl keep mda
/usr/bin/procmail

works fine as far as delivering mail to a dozen mailboxes, using the
.procmailrc which has served flawlessly on the old host for decades.
BUT the standard mbox format email separator "From ..." is omitted on
the beowulf install, making newly received emails unreadable in mutt.
(It's described at some length in the mbox manpage, so I won't
belabour
it here.)

I've found no mention of mbox format controls in either the procmail
or
procmailrc manpages, perhaps because it was always the default.Google
is drawing a blank thus far.
The new host has procmail version v3.23pre 2001/09/13 , while the old
one has v3.22 2001/09/10.
Why not have fetchmail deliver to an MTA on port 25? Well, I tried
thatfirst (beowulf has exim), but that did exactly the same thing.
Direct deliveryto procmail removes one variable.
Is anyone successfully using procmail -> mbox mailboxeson beowulf?
I could probably munge a solution with "formail -I", but it shouldn't
be
necessary to bodge my way to standard behaviour.
Erik
A previous send of this post hasn't even been Bcced by the
mailserverafter an hour, so I'm venturing a retry.