Re: Filtering

["Tage Borg" <tage ckrakes com>]

Tony:
>At 11:40 2000-01-26 +0100, Tage Borg wrote:
>>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.
>
>The filtering could be done at the user's machine. If it's running Balsa,
>then it can probably run procmail.


Yes, but if I've understood procmail correctly, it is invoked by sendmail
(by use of ~/.forward). Procmail processes /var/spool/mail/username (or the
equivalent) and moves new mail to ~/Mail/* or something like that. To make
procmail work from within Balsa without great effort, this would mean that
Balsa would have to fetch mail, move it to the mail spool and then invoke
procmail, wouldn't it? And that would only work for POP3 mail. In that case
one might as well use the old fetchmail/sendmail/procmail combo... (Perhaps
not such a bad idea even for end users without a clue about configuring
these programs, if only Balsa provides a GUI for configuration.)

I'm not sure where all this leads, but perhaps in the end, Balsa will need
it's own filtering (for IMAP users without access to the server) in addition
to support for procmail. That's a lot of code to write...

    /Tage