My Procmail

There's a lot of talk about procmail in the Mac OS X community as of late. It kinda makes me chuckle when I read about people just discovering it. I have literally been using procmail for years.

I've never been a big fan off filtering mail on the client side, and since I have a tendency to access my mail from various machines, POP3 never really worked for me. When I first looked at IMAP I was quickly discouraged by how slow it often was when accessing mail servers across the net.

As most people do, I have multiple mail accounts, often located on remote servers. I use fetchmail, on my own mail server, to retrieve mail from my various remote pop accounts. Once new mail is retrieved, procmail handles all filtering. In other words, I've created a dedicated last mile mail system.

Since I never directly access any outside IMAP mail servers, receiving and sending mail is always blazing fast. I also never have to wait for my mail client to perform filtering; my mail always comes pre-sorted.

Procmail is great for filtering spam, which is one of the reason why it is getting a lot of attention. My personal favorite spam filter is:

* !^TO_.*[Er][Rr][Ii][KkCc]\@[Tt][Hh][Aa][Uu][Vv][Ii][Nn]\.[Nn][Ee][Tt]
Mail/Junk

It ensures that mail not directly addressed to me is placed in my junk folder. Simple, but quite effective. I'd say it catches about 70% of all unwanted mail I receive.

Another favorite of mine, is a filter which flags certain messages. For example the ones sent by my wife:

:0 fhw
* ^From.*vicki\@thauvin\.net
| formail -i "X-Status: F"

Updates

BBEdit 6.5.1 implements support for JSP syntax highlighting. Finally!!!

I've also just installed Mac OS X 10.1.2 and IE 5.1.

Hello, Miss?

Vicki told me yesterday that I sometimes sound like a woman when I answer the phone. It made me feel like a kid again.

On December 21, 1803 The United States purchased the Louisiana Territories from France for $15 million.

Microsoft Rules Microsoft employees that is. As I predicted, all of the Lord of The Rings shows were sold out. Vicki and I arrived early. We were basically waiting for her brother and sister to give them the bad news. As usual, for most movie premieres, the place was swarming with team members from various Microsoft groups. They always seem to travel in flocks. Some guy did ask us if we needed tickets. We said no as we thought he was scalping, but a little while later he left a ticket on the top of a garbage can right before entering the theater. I quickly picked it up. As the relatives arrived we explained the situation: "One ticket, 4 people… Still no go." A few minutes later a woman handed us 3 tickets stating that the members of her group were not going to show up. We offered to pay for them, but she refused as it was not in the spirit of the holiday season. Xmas came early this year. Thanks Microsoft. 3 hours later we had lunch at Ruby's.

Talking about the Holiday Spirit…

Ready to Rock 'n' Roll

My new computer, disk drive (and cigars) were all delivered between 11 and 11:15 on Monday morning. Eerie…

The remaining components arrived yesterday morning.

I haven't had a chance to test it all yet, but the box appeared functional without the NIC and sound card installed.

Lord of the Rings

We're going to try to go see it this morning. I'm afraid it'll be all sold out. Vicki's brother thinks we'll be able to get tickets for one of the morning show at the Redmond Town Center Loews Cineplex.

Move over iPaq!

FileMaker

It's official. FileMaker's JDBC implementation sucks!

I've been pulling my hairs for the last few days working on an custom job for one of our clients. So many wasted hours working around their bugs… Pretty pathetic.

Not 4 Sale

Adam Curry's house in Amsterdam is no longer for sale. Bummer… I was just about to bid for it.

French Pop

Apparently they have their own version of Britney Spears and Eden's Crush.

Merry Xmas!

On December 19, 1957 Elvis Presley received his U.S. Army draft notice.

Delivery Day

If everything goes according to plan, my new computer should arrive today, via UPS. The drive, nic and video cards should also be here today, via FedEx.

I'm also expecting some cigars from the Thompson Cigars Co., via Airborne

On December 17, 1959 The film On the Beach premiered in New York City and in 17 other cities. It was the first motion picture to debut simultaneously in major cities around the world.