hunted around the archives, none of the replies seemed to help with this, so apologies if this has been answered before and I missed it.

I'm trying to get maildrop to execute a little c program when I send it an email with the subject line "Bl" from my phone:

if (/^From: 8029...@VTEXT.COM/ && /^Subject: Bl/) { xfilter "/home/fengland/bin/blastgb" }

the filter is matching fine. Replacing the binary with a simple shell script echoing some output to a file works just fine, but when I try to get it to execute the binary, I get this in the maillog:

Mar 22 14:59:11 doghouse maildrop[13201]: Unable to filter message.

it will filter the message ok when putting the command in backticks and specifying a mailbox to deliver to on the next line, but the command again doesn't run. "blastgb" logs to a file, but nothing shows up there, and it doesn't do anything. I can run it just fine from the command line. my shell is /bin/bash, and SHELL=/bin/bash is specified in my .mailfilterrc as well. Maildrop is running in delivery mode via postfix with /usr/bin/maildrop -d ${USER}.

any ideas? thanks in advance