procmail anyone?

technobard · 02-24-2003, 11:59 AM

Kind of a low priority project of mine, but I was wondering if anyone had any direct experience with procmail? I was thinking of creating a special purpose email filter and this seems like the way to go.

bdl · 02-24-2003, 04:25 PM

I use procmail to filter several mailing lists and other various email into my ~/Mail directory, works well for my purposes. Specific questions?

technobard · 02-24-2003, 08:37 PM

Sure. I'm still in the "finding the right tool for the job" stage, but I was thinking about creating a members only email account. Rather than trying to figure out what is spam and what isn't, my account would work off a list. If you're on the list, your email gets through, if you're not on the list, the email is discarded...with one exception. Email with a particular subject (Request for Inclusion) and body (some optional tags) is processed and added to a list of pending email addresses. This will allow people who change their email addresses to still notify me.

I'm just wondering if procmail is the right tool or if something else will work better. I'll have to spend some time getting up to speed on whatever the tool is.

technobard · 02-27-2003, 11:01 AM

Just an FYI. I came across a commercial product that does most of what I want. Of course, I'm not interesting in actually paying money.

Also, it runs on a Microsoft platform complete with a SQL Server backend. Not exactly a selling point. The site is http://www.junkspam.com

bdl · 02-27-2003, 05:05 PM

Sorry for the late reply. Yes, I believe procmail will do what you're asking for, I just basically use it to filter different emails to different mailboxes based on Return-Path info. AFAIK every header parameter, such as Return-Path, From:, Subject:, etc can be used as a filter.

technobard · 02-28-2003, 06:58 AM

Thanks, bdl. I also found Mail::Audit (a perl module). I'll probably go this route since I already know perl.

technobard · 03-03-2003, 08:05 AM

Not that anyone but me is really interesting in this, but TMDA (tagged message delivery agent?) seems to do almost exactly what I had in mind. Website: http://tmda.net/

I also found a commercial email site that uses TMDA and has a very nice integrated front end. I'm playing with a 30 day free trial account. Check it out at: http://www.mailsnare.net