Re: Filtering

["Tage Borg" <tage ckrakes com>]

Pawel:
>
>On 26 Jan, Axel Eble wrote:
>> [...]
>>>
>>> procmail starts upon boot on all Linux systems whether you use it or
>>> not.  You can't waste resources that are already in use.
>>
>> Wrong. Procmail is often called by sendmail whenever it delivers a
message
>> locally. Procmail is not a process that gets started whenever the system
boots.
>
>Yes, that's true: procmail is started only at the delivery. Anyway, I
>think the anti-filtering argument is convincing: the Unix philosophy
>says that it's MTA's duty to provide filtering, not MUA's. It's better
>to contribute a GUI setup tool to procmail (and possibly a way to
>start it also from balsa) than add this kind of code to balsa.


[unlurk]

Yes, ideally the MTA should handle the filtering. However, it is not
uncommon that the user has no control over the MTA. Consider my ISP: I can
connect and retrieve mail by POP3 (only) and I have no shell access. Without
my own server (to which I forward mail from alla other accounts I have), I
wouldn't have the possibility to use procmail.

Also: if a user doesn't run balsa on their MTA, how would balsa write to
.procmailrc on the server? Mail account usernames and/or passwords are not
always the same as the shell login usernames/passwords.

I personally don't care much about filtering, since I do it with procmail on
my MTA and then fetch my mail with IMAP. But there are lots of circumstances
that prohibit relying on procmail for ordinary users. Let's not forget that
not all users have access to their mail server, let alone run it themselves.
I even consider it likely that most users (even the vast majority) have *no*
control over their MTA and any filtering done there. And most un*xes do not
have procmail installed by default anyways.

    /Tage