Subject: PINE procmail interface?

From: [email-masked] (Malcolm L. Carlock)
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 22:31:39 GMT

I think that many of us have either wondered, or had users ask us, "how
can I set up mail filtering from PINE?"

As most of us know, this is a function of separate filtering software,
of which PROCMAIL is probably the best example.

However, I suspect that most PINE users (particularly PC-PINE users who
don't normally log into Unix) are not up to creating and maintaining
.procmailrc files for themselves.

Has the PINE project considered adding a procmail editing interface to
PINE?  (Not that they don't already have a full plate...)

I'd love to be able to tell folks they can create filtering themselves
via PINE.  Eudora Pro does this, though of course at the local PC,
whither their mail is slurped via the (yech) POP protocol.

Alternatively, does anyone know of any menu- or GUI-based interfaces to
procmail (other than the Project project at Cal Poly?)

I can see creating a WWW-based interface for this, but it would require
an HTTP process on the server where procmail runs.  I can also see the
potential for some serious security holes if such a thing were not
written carefully.

If our users could set up a .procmailrc on the server from within PINE,
it would be most useful.  I'd be willing to volunteer for some work on
this, if the PINE Project were interested.

Malcolm

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Malcolm L. Carlock                    UNR Unix Administration and Support
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---

From: Dean Pentcheff <[email-masked]>
Date: 26 Nov 1996 23:35:04 -0500

[email-masked] (Malcolm L. Carlock) writes:
...
> PINE?  (Not that they don't already have a full plate...)
...
> this, if the PINE Project were interested.

[Sorry in advance - this post started as a reply with a single point
to make, but degenerated into a set of musings on related matters...]

I really like the idea of getting some sort of access to mail
filtering added into Pine -- people strongly expect it to be there
(yes, yes, we _do_ know that this is an MUA not an MDA and all that
good stuff, but...).

However, this may be more difficult than it seems.  For folks running
Pine on a Unix box it's "just" a matter of providing some sort of easy
interface to writing a .procmailrc file (and creating the appropriate
.forward file), or the equivalent for filter, et al.  But... what
about folks running Pine on a PC, remotely accessing an IMAP server?
If they have a Unix shell account, it could be dealt with through
either arranging for the remote Pine to write the .procmailrc/.forward
files there, or requiring a one-time logon, and using the host-based
Pine to do the job.

But I suspect it's becoming more common to set up IMAP servers as
independent mail-spool machines, where users don't have a logon or
home directory, just a mail file.  Are those folks just out of luck?
Or is there some sort of solution that could be devised for them?

And, back to the main point... to generalize it a little, maybe
something could be done to allow a sort of "plug-in" as a mail filter
construction routine.  After all, there are procmail, filter, and
whatever-else out there.  Perhaps something analogous to the way Pine
currently (I think) invokes the system's "passwd" command, or the way
Pine now has hooks for doing external processing of read/written
messages (primarily used for encryption).  If the approach is external
and modular, then system folk could install the module(s) relevant for
their system.

Hmmm... in conjunction with that, might there be a way to use the
filtering hooks, procmail, and some scripting glue to allow me to read
a message and then, say, "reply" to the message (via a special filter)
in such a way that its sender gets put automatically into a
block-mail-from-this-sender list...  Interesting...

-Dean
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