Re: Filtering

[Mike Bond <mike bond template com>]

Tage Borg wrote:
> 
> [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.
> 

I think you will find that for many users the MTA essentially is balsa
and other similar mail clients, getting mail from a POP server. Most
ISPs with POP servers out there do not provide any kind of access to the
true MTA, which would be on the POP server.

I also believe that it was rather erroneous to assume that procmail is
installed in "all" Linux systems, I for one do not have it installed on
my personal machine, but then I do tend to strip everything I don't or
can't reasonably use. And there was the minor point made by Tage Borg
that procmail quite often does not get installed on other *nix systems.

While I do agree that building on top of pre-existing wheels is a good
thing, rather than re-inventing them, I do not really want to have to
install yet another package on top of the myriad of packages already
required that will be used only by Balsa, given all the other Gnome
requirements. In the end, I will do what I must, someday I hope to be
able to stop using Netscape mail (ugh!), but currently it is the only
direct POP mail client that does all I need it to do, including
filtering. And yes, given the choice of installing procmail and
periodically re-learning yet another pseudo-language for something that
will get changed once in a blue moon, or using Netscape with a built-in
filter gui that is relatively easy to understand, I will stick with the
quite buggy, system hogging Netscape.


-- 
TTFN
MikeB

Application development is a race between software engineers who
try to create fool proof programs and the universe which is trying to
develop superior fools.
	
	So far, the universe is winning.
	Let's not give it any help...