[olug] Python based replacement for Procmail

[William E. Kempf]

Christopher Cashell said:
> At Mon, 11 Oct 04, Unidentified Flying Banana William E. Kempf, said:
>> I have a love/hate relationship with procmail.  Being the "defacto
>> standard" for filtering e-mail on Linux, I've been using it for several
>> years now.  It works, but there are definately things I dislike about
>> it.
>> Here's a list:
>
> [Snip: Why procmail sucks.]
>
> Yeah, I can't stand procmail.  Talk about a horrible monstrosity of an
> ugly solution to a common situation.
>
> [Snip.]
>
> Just out of curiosity, did you look at maildrop[1], from the Courier[2]
> project?

No, I was under the impression that it was Courier specific, and I use
Postfix.

> It's actually not Courier specific (Like Courier-IMAP, it will work with
> other MTA's; I'm currently using it with Qmail, and the guy who
> introduced me to it uses it with Postfix), and works quite well.

Nice to know.  I did a quick look at the documentation.  Much better than
Procmail, and probably could be forced into doing what I want.  However,
the $MATCH variable and regex handling still would lead to slightly more
complex situations than what I have with pyfilt.  Plus the fact that
pyfilt is a library in a full scripting language still leaves me with a
lot more power and flexibility than a dedicated mail filtering language
could ever provide.

> It supports basic logic, has an easy to read syntax (especially compared
> to procmail), and generally does everything I need.  Integrating a spam
> filter was a breeze, too.
>
>> Sorry if this rambling was boring for anyone, but if you read this far
>> and
>> are interested in the script or in helping in any way, PLEASE send me a
>> private e-mail.
>
> I'm not much for Python, and quite satisfied with Maildrop, but I found
> the post to be quite interesting, and worth reading. ;-)

Glad to hear it ;)

-- 
William E. Kempf