mail filter in python?

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Gerrit Holl <gerrit.holl at pobox.com>:
...
| The procmail syntax is really obfuscated. What about creating a mail
| filter with a Python syntax? Shouldn't be too difficult, just create
| some functions (drop, match_header) and execfile() a file with the
| rexec module...

I think this is usually how an obfuscated syntax is born, with the
words ``Hey, this shouldn't be too difficult!''

I don't think procmail's notation is really that hard to work with.
(I mean if you want obfuscated, look at its C code.)  A lot of work
has gone into procmail's functionality, and it could probably benefit
from more.  Anyway, it might be interesting in this context to look
at Sift-Mail, a Tcl application from Lawrence Lundblade:
http://www.island-resort.com/sm.htm  and the Sieve language proposed as
an Internet standard for mail filtering, http://www.cyrusoft.com/sieve/

	Donn Cave, University Computing Services, University of Washington
	donn at u.washington.edu