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.