The post right below yours on Planet Debian () describes a setup including delivery through Dovecot's LDA, which reads Sieve filters. I use something similar myself, but with Postfix instead of Exim - Sieve is basically "procmail, but sane".

"make" may be a lot less irreplaceable than you think!

Take a look at Shake (https://github.com/ndmitchell/shake) -- more powerful, much less annoying, and can even run many Makefiles (http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2014/01/running-makefiles-with-shake.html). With some work, Shake could replace make even in large projects with existing Makefiles!

Reports of procmail's death are not terribly exaggerated - Posted four years ago.

Courier's MDA is also a good alternative to procmail (which is horrible in many ways).

I also agree that Dovecot is the best in this regard.

Although I do have dovecot setup for remote IMAP access you might remember that my email client doesn't support IMAP...

Take a look at https://github.com/teythoon/afew

Thanks for the link.

My own notes are here:

• https://github.com/skx/redemption

I assume that you are already aware of maildrop? Well, it is an improvement over procmail, at least in terms of syntax and reliability. It sounds as though you're thinking of a replacement in broader terms, but still it might be worth it to take a look at maildrop, see if you can't switch to it with some (even if minor) immediate benefits, and then again consider the broader picture :)

Thanks for the pointer to maildrop - at the moment I'm investigating it, along with:

• maildirproc
• Mail::Audit

I do like the idea of Lua, but if I have to "program" in Perl, Python, or similar, then that isn't the end of the world.

I came here to say good things about maildrop, but I see someone has already. Instead, I'll point out that I used to futz around with Mail::Audit (and prior to that, procmail) and just about everything is less aggravating to do in maildrop.

I am implementing sieve for people at work, but the kind of people who could write their own sieve recipes are the kind of people I won't mind allowing to ssh in to the mail server and edit their maildrop recipes.

The only reason you should still be using procmail today is "I'm too lazy to replace it". There are several alternatives:

- maildrop
- Sieve (which is actually an RFC-defined protocol, not a file format, and is supported by many IMAP-speaking MUAs)
- My personal favourite: if you use exim as MTA, you can use exim filter files. See http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/filter.html for the spec.