[[!meta title="MIT SIPB Mail Script Service"]]
The mail script service uses
[procmail](http://www.google.com/search?q=procmail) allows people
to set up scripts to process e-mail using an
[Athena](http://web.mit.edu/ist/topics/athena/) account. Although
this service has been designed with reliability in mind, it should
not be used to run critical applications that cannot tolerate
downtime.

Your mail scripts will automatically process mail sent to

    YOUR_LOCKER_NAME@scripts.mit.edu or
    YOUR_LOCKER_NAME+ANY_TAG@scripts.mit.edu or
    ANY_TAG@YOUR_LOCKER_NAME.scripts.mit.edu

If you have a non-MIT hostname served by scripts.mit.edu, your mail
scripts will also process mail sent to

    ANY_TAG@YOUR_DOMAIN.com

You can access the tag on a message from your procmailrc file by
parsing the X-Original-To header or as the $1 variable.

#### **To sign up for the service:**

    athena% add scripts
    athena% signup-mail

(If you are confused about how to run the above commands on Athena,
e-mail scripts@mit.edu for assistance. You must have an
[Athena account](http://web.mit.edu/olh/Register/) and understand
the
[MITnet rules of use](http://web.mit.edu/olh/Welcome/rules.html) in
order to use the service.)

This signup process will create a **mail\_scripts** directory.
Learn about [procmail](http://www.google.com/search?q=procmail) and
modify your \~/mail\_scripts/procmailrc file to do whatever mail
processing you desire. You may want to look at our sample files in
[/mit/jbarnold/mail\_scripts](http://web.mit.edu/jbarnold/mail_scripts/).
If your scripts need to write data, be sure to
[give daemon.scripts the necessary access](http://scripts.mit.edu/faq/31/can-my-scripts-write-data-somewhere)
in AFS.

Finally, add yourself to the
[scripts-announce mailing list](https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/scripts-announce)
if you would like to receive announcements of major service changes
and outages. This list receives less than one e-mail per month on
average.

For more information, see our list of
[Frequently Asked Questions](../faq/).