procmail: processing old mail

Question

I finished tunning my .procmailrc, now I want to process all the mails I have in my Inbox. How can I do that?

Answer 1

The tool for doing this is formail which is part of procmail. You first move all the mail you want to process somewhere else to prevent infinite loops and then run formail -s procmail < old_inbox where old_inbox is what you renamed your mail file. This assumes your mailbox is a single file in mbox format.