Re: Filtering

[David Pickens <dpickens iaesthetic com>]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Jules Bean wrote:

> All that having been said, there are a few arguments for filtering
> built-in to balsa:
>
> Procmail's config files are genuinely unnecessarily opaque in design.  It
> is possible to have power without being that opaque :-)
> 
> Having the filtering in-balsa is more flexible for the case that your
> messages are physically distributed on a variety of systems -- in the
> procmail case, you'd need procmailrc's in every place
> 
> Having the filtering in-balsa allows better integration with balsa's other
> facilities, and would allow for some quite cool 'wizards' watching your
> normal mail-moving habits and guessing filtering rules.
> 

I might add one advantage to this, and that is that we can allow for a
pretty flexible system of callbacks that allow users to execute perl
routines either on every message, or on messages that meet certain
criteria.  The idea for perl came to me when I had to write a short perl
'plug-in' script for X-Chat.  I'm not terribly familiar w/ procmail,
having never used it, and it may also allow for execution of outside
scripts, but then there's the issue of providing for the script a set of
routines to allow it to tell balsa to do a variety of things to the
messages.

This might allow someone to say, if the message comes from 'Fred' and
'lawsuit' is in the subject, move the message to the 'Legal' folder,
forward to 'Mary' but strip the headers and remove all references to
'Greg', replacing them with '****' or something equally goofy.

The real disadvantage to this is, it seems to me, the potential for abuse.
If people are in the habit of installing 'plug-ins' without looking at the
source, then we could end up with a linux Melissa 'virus', etc.  (A
'Warning this is Potentially Dangerous - Have you examined the source?'
dialog might relieve us of responsibility. :)  )


> *however*
...
> 
> Camel is on its way, and camel's vfolder stuff will sort-of supercede
> filtering, and camel will have some filtering capability built-in.
> 
> 
> All of which having been said: if someone wants to code filtering, do it.
> Just think about the above issues first!
> 
> Jules

I worry about this too -- it's a hard balance to strike in terms of adding
stuff that camel/evolution might provide.  I'm not sure I have the answer
to this.  If I look at in and it seems like a fun thing to do, and that
it's reasonable given the time I have, I wouldn't mind doing it; but, that
has to do with my disclaimer before about having to do some research
before committing myself to it!  :)

David