Re: Filtering

[Peter Williams <peter newton cx>]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 16:36:27 Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Jules Bean wrote:

These are all good ideas, and having taken them into account, I have a 
plan. But first, my impression of the pros and cons of using procmail:


Pro - An enhancement for procmail is an enhancement for Balsa.
      Procmail is widely installed.
      Procmail already works.
Con - Procmail's configuration format is obtuse.
      Although procmail is common it is not universal 
          (We don't want to be restricted to Linux...)

So I have the following ideas:
   - We should be able to read in .procmailrc's.
   - We should be able to write to .procmailrc's.
   - We should be able to filter mail in Balsa, independent of Balsa.
     If a user wants to use procmail, that's fine with us.
   - We should have a configurator that works for both Balsa and 
.procmail

This is my conception of the user interface:
   - A two sided dialog like the Preferences window, with a mailbox list 
in the lefthand pane
     (Through which the user can filter mail that arrives in any folder)
   - In addition to the mailbox list, two extra choices: 'Procmail' or 
some such thing, that
     writes to .procmailrc, and 'Outgoing', for mail that is being sent.
   - The righthand side is a list of rules and actions, a decision tree 
probably represented
     as a GtkCList.
   - Tools for making generic regexes, so instead of "There is a header 
that =~ /^From[ \t]+Bob/"
     the user can say "From 'Bob'", and there is a regex called 'From' 
that looks like /^From[ \t]+%s/
     
     OK that last one is really confusing :-(

The 'decision tree' that I see looks like this:

-------------------------|-----------|--------|--------|
If subject contains:     | $$$$$$    |        |        |
    Move to:             | trash     |        |        |
If sender contains:      | Laura     |        |        |
    Copy to:             | private   |        |        |
    If subject contains: | elope     |        |        |
        Replace          | Laura     | with   | ****** |

Actually, perhaps just a VBox will suffice.

This has the drawback that it's impossible to specify a rule for 
multiple mailboxes simultaneously (for instance if the user wishes to 
use some spam filters for all their newsgroup mailboxes). We could 
overcome that with the ability to define groups of mailboxes that can 
also have filters applied to them.

Comment away! Now all we need is someone to code it... :-)

==============================
Peter Williams peter@newton.cx