Lesson 11	Troubleshooting procmail
Objective	Troubleshoot procmail.

Troubleshooting maildrop

Question: What are the steps to troubleshot the mail program known as maildrop?

Troubleshooting procmail

Troubleshooting procmail can be tricky. There are many steps that email goes through to get from sender to recipient, and any of those steps can be a point of failure. To isolate the problem, follow the following steps:

Verify that procmail is installed; make sure that /usr/bin/procmail exists and is executable.
Check that your procmail configuration file is not world-writeable. You can set it to be world-readable with chmod 644 $HOME/.procmailrc.
Explicitly set the MAILDIR, LOGFILE, and VERBOSE variables at the top of your procmail configuration. For example:
```
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail-log VERBOSE=on
```
If procmail executes when mail arrives, then a logfile, called procmail-log will be created in your home directory.
Check to make sure that your mail directory, which you specified with the MAILDIR variable, exists.
After you send the email, check the logfile to see how procmail handled it.

The following MouseOver illustrates the verbose logging of a typical procmail session:

Verbose logging from procmail

The next lesson concludes this module.