Adam Bower abower@thebowery.co.uk writes:
Anyhow the lesson to be learned is that procmail is very powerful but when given to someone who thinks that they know what they are doing it becomes a very dangerous weapon!
I'm tempted to write a stand-alone procmail alternative with a nicer configuration language, probably based on Gnus's "fancy mail splitting" feature. When I consider why I use Gnus, the mail filtering and the scoring are the top two reasons.
Anyway, let's start with market research:
- who would be interested in a friendlier procmail?
- should it have both GUI and file-based configuration methods?
- what alternatives are already out there? I can't seem to find a good one, but maybe one of you uses one already?
on Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 07:21:22PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
Anyway, let's start with market research:
- who would be interested in a friendlier procmail?
procmail is getting quite dated now, regexes are very useful though, and as long as you don't make mistakes it's great. something that would be nice is scoring and more intelligent filtering. this would need interfacing with the mua though.
- should it have both GUI and file-based configuration methods?
only if running the GUI doesn't cause the file based configuration to become unmanagable. an ipfilter like configuration of mail filtering could prove interesting. (make a general statement at the top, and narrow down matching as you go down further)
- what alternatives are already out there? I can't seem to find a
good one, but maybe one of you uses one already?
the majority of my procmail rules end up being for filtering out mailing lists into various folders. there seem to be four basic mailing list systems in wide spread use: ezml, majordomo, listserv (less now though) and mailman. so a general way of filtering each could be easily worked out.
once you have basic rules to identify lists, then the other stuff is likely to be lower volume and easier to look after. because of this i currently have a script that keeps track of the mailing lists i'm on (it knows how to subscript and unsubscribe), where the mail should go, etc. it doesn't yet generate procmailrc yet though, i should really do this soon.
On 17-Oct-01 MJ Ray wrote:
Adam Bower abower@thebowery.co.uk writes:
Anyhow the lesson to be learned is that procmail is very powerful but when given to someone who thinks that they know what they are doing it becomes a very dangerous weapon!
I'm tempted to write a stand-alone procmail alternative with a nicer configuration language, probably based on Gnus's "fancy mail splitting" feature. When I consider why I use Gnus, the mail filtering and the scoring are the top two reasons.
Anyway, let's start with market research:
- who would be interested in a friendlier procmail?
I have yet to try procmail so I dont know how many people have got to the stage of using procmail as its quite high up the feeding chain of use. first you have to have fetchmail and a sendmail equivalent running then maybe a spam filter or procmail.
I had a look on fresh meat and found at url
http://freshmeat.net/browse/29/
8. cats2procmailrc A filter that generates procmail recipes from human-friendly single-line rules. 10. Deep Six Client side spam filtering software.
12. Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse A distributed spam filter. 14. emacs-sieve Sieve mail filtering language and managing support for Emacs. 25. hldfilter An email filter easier to use than procmail. 26. IMAPFilter A mail filtering utility for IMAP mailboxes. 31. JFetch A message fetching and filtering system. 35. Mailchain Email scanner/filter 36. maildrop A mail filter/mail delivery agent 37. Maildrop Spam Filter An unwanted-mail filter for maildrop. 38. Mailfilter A flexible utility to get rid of spam in POP3 mailboxes. 39. MailScanner Email virus scanner and spam tagger 40. Mailscanner for Postfix Scans mails and bounces the ones containing potentially harmful attachments
there was another 3 pages at least after the 2 pages I read which leads me to think that if Adam wanted something easier or better than procmail he could find one and the evaluation of all of them would take an age.
- should it have both GUI and file-based configuration methods?
I think a test feature would be really useful. where it can be tested against your mail.
- what alternatives are already out there? I can't seem to find a
good one, but maybe one of you uses one already?
I diddnt know but I will probably use procmail unless you write one as I would like to help you, but I am sure I would end up using procmail if you dont bother.
Some of the distributed spam filtering software does appeal though I may have to give one of them a go.
Maybe I shall set up an alternative user and filter a copy of all my mail to test it out. I am sorry to be so downhartening but there are many already and you did ask.
Very High Regards
Owen
PS what I do want is a utility for importing and exporting all my mail to all the big email clients and back again. such a product if working for Kmail pine Netscape and XFMail would then become a defacto standard mail format conversion utility
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MJ Ray -
oms101＠freeuk.com -
xsprite＠bigfoot.com