From: ram@eiffel.com (Raphael Manfredi)
Newsgroups: comp.archives
Subject: [comp.lang.perl] Perl mail filter program publicly available
Followup-To: poster
Date: 21 Jul 1992 09:33:39 GMT
Organization: Interactive Software Engineering, Santa Barbara CA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu
Summary: How to get a mail filter program written in perl
X-Original-Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl,comp.mail.mh,comp.mail.elm,alt.sources.d
X-Original-Date: 20 Jul 92 20:58:18 GMT

Archive-name: auto/comp.lang.perl/Perl-mail-filter-program-publicly-available

ANNOUNCEMENT

I have made a previous announcement in comp.lang.perl, stating I was looking
for a FTP site willing to archive the distribution. I would like to express
my thanks to all those who responded, namely (order of arrival):

	Bill Silvert <silvert@cs.dal.ca>
	Christopher Davis <ckd@eff.org>
	sondeen@isi.edu
	John N. Stewart <jns@nas.nasa.gov>

Here are the required information to grab a copy of the distribution via
anonymous FTP:

	Host: ftp.eff.org (192.88.144.4),
	Directory: /pub/net-tools
	File: perl-mailagent.tar.Z

This is version 2.9 PL0 (as of today), and it is a beta version, preparing
the final 3.0 release which should be part of a general software distribution
package.


WHY A NEW FILTER?

Elm and MH users who are currently using the "standard" filter program
(respectively "filter" and "slocal") might find the perl mailagent I wrote
useful. I think it has all the commonly used (and needed) features, plus
the advantage of being written in a scripting language -- although I doubt
someone really has to actually edit the code: the configuration being flexible
enough to satisfy most installation criteria and is done in a separate
~/.mailagent file.

Filtering rules are specified using a lex-like syntax. In fact, this is the
main reason which is at the origin of this program. The ELM filter program
specifies rules "in English", but it lacks regular expressions and happily
appends mails to your folders by using something like:

	open(MBOX, ">$folder");
	print MBOX <STDIN>;
	close MBOX;

Who said there is no error checking nor file locking? ;-)
(The ELM filter is written in C, the above excerpt is perl code, which is more
concise than the equivalent C, I think)

The ~/.maildelivery used by slocal from the MH distribution is intended to
be compatible with MMDF (as far as I know) and is not very "readable". The
only viable alternative if you are an MH user is to use Martin Strike's
audit.pl package. But I can't use that package on my machine, for various
reasons (contact me for details: ram@eiffel.com).

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

This mailagent program finds its roots into an earlier version written by
the author of perl himself, in his "dist" 2.0 package. Since February 1991, it
has progressively evolved into a 5000+ lines script.

Because it also pleases the author of my story, a lot of work has been put in
this program to make it easy to configure, install, use and maintain.
-- 
Raphael Manfredi <ram@eiffel.com>
Interactive Software Engineering Inc.
270 Storke Road, Suite #7                      / Tel +1 (805) 685-1006 \
Goleta, California 93117, USA                  \ Fax +1 (805) 685-6869 /