Nick --
...and then Nick Jennings said...
%
% there a reason why this is something that is continuously not a feature in
% UNIX mail clients? yes procmail is powerfull, but its far too much of a
Simple: in the UNIX world, little tools that do a few things, or just one
thing, *very*well* get put together in any way you see fit to build
whatever you want. In the WinDoze world, you don't have such fancy
communication and construction, and so someone has to go out and write a
whole new app or bloat up an existing one when you want one teeny new
feature.
The problem of "but it's a remote IMAP box and I can't do anything on it"
has come up a few times. I won't go into whether that's good or bad, but
I do like the suggestion of writing a sort of "procmail-for-IMAP" that
will do filtering on the IMAP server for you. It could be as clever as
procmail or extremely simple. Thanks to IMAP's ability to leave a Delete
flag in place when you exit, this proposed app could even be set to flag
processed files for deletion but not purge them.
Gee, this sounds a lot like procmail after all. Why not just add the
ability to read and write IMAP "mailboxes" to procmail? Because it's
very different; it would be better to implement this separately. If one
wanted to code in "normal" mailbox types as well, that's fine; just don't
expect Mr. Procmail to add a huge change-of-design into procmail.
% hassle for just setting up a simple filter, something in the muttrc like
% this:
%
% newmail-hook ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) +mutt-users-mail
%
% would be simple enough and very easy to impliment. It could just search the
% headers for that pattern, not even the body (since that would slow it down
% more). Sure its not as powerfull as procmail can get, but its certainly
% better for simple filtering wich is what most people need to do anyways.
The problem, though, is that you then have to actually be reading your
mail in order for any filtering to happen. I'd much rather have my
filtering happen when I'm *not* sitting there tapping my fingers and
waiting, personally. And don't tell me that computers are fast; I get
over a hundred messages a day and sometimes don't get to log in for two
or three days, and that's quite a backlog to handle all at once --
especially over a dialup connection (think IMAP and header processing and
all that).
%
% --
% - Nick Jennings
% Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
% Web : http://nick.namodn.com
% -
:-D
--
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