Sam Varshavchik wrote:

Thanks, Sam. But I solved the problem before I read your message, by adding "$MAILDIR/" to each expression in the "to" statements.

I also discovered that I had added an extraneous "=" to the logfile instruction, writing it as:

logfile="$HOME/.mailfilter.log"

which produced a syntax error. And I had failed to escape the square brackets ("[" and "]") in some of the patterns.

%%%%%

I still need to run again one experiment. In attempting to sort on the "To:" and "From:" headers from multiple addresses, the first construction below appeared to give trouble:

if ( ( /^(To||From):.*(red||green||blue) ) to $MAILDIR/colour

while the second was successful:

if ( ( /^(To||From):.*red/ ) \ || ( /^(To||From):.*green/ ) \ || ( /^(To||From):.*blue/ ) \ || ( /^(To||From):.*yellow/ ) \ ) to $MAILDIR/colour

%%%%%

Following is the "~/.mailfilter" file which I now am running and which appears to work correctly. Note that I am using maildir structures, which maildrop recognizes automatically (by the fact that the destinations are directories):

MAILDIR="$HOME/mail" DEFAULT="$HOME/mail/nondescript"

logfile "$HOME/.mailfilter.log"

if ( /^Subject:.*SPAM/ ) to $MAILDIR/spam

if ( /^(To||Cc):.*debian-user/ ) to $MAILDIR/computer/debian

if ( /^(To||Cc):.*mutt-users/ ) to $MAILDIR/computer/mutt

if ( /^Subject:.*\[alsa-user\]/ ) to $MAILDIR/computer/alsa

to $MAILDIR/nondescript

RLH