Re: Filtering

["Anthony E. Greene" <agreene pobox com>]

At 12:31 2000-01-26 +0100, Tage Borg wrote:
>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). 

That is one way. It can also be invoked by fetchmail. This is useful for
machines that do not have a full time connection to the Internet. Running
sendmail may not be necessary.

Recent versions of sendmail on Linux are configured to use procmail as the
local mailer. The user does not need a ~/.forward file. I don't know if
that configuration is unique to Linux or if it ships with sendmail on UNIX
also.

>Procmail processes /var/spool/mail/username (or the
>equivalent) and moves new mail to ~/Mail/* or something like that. 

According to the manpage, it reads from STDIN and writes to the filtered
location. If no delivery recipies apply, it writes to the user's mail
spool. This is consistent with it's use by sendmail and fetchmail as the
local mail delivery agent.

>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? 

Balsa would have to pipe it through procmail. But that would not work for
IMAP accounts. It would probably be best if Balsa did it's own filtering
while keeping support for mail that has already been filtered by procmail. 

I don't think Balsa developers should worry about creating a GUI for
procmail or fetchmail configuration. Those applications have their own
developers.

Personally, I will continue to use fetchmail/procmail because it's powerful
and it's independant of the MUA. It filters during unattended downloads and
is not hard to configure if you just want to put certain messages in
specific folders.

 Tony
 --
 Anthony E. Greene <agreene@pobox.com>
 Homepage and PGP Key: <http://www.pobox.com/~agreene/>
 If it's too good to be true, it's probably Linux