ANN: pop3filter 0.1

Gerson Kurz gerson.kurz at t-online.de
Fri May 17 14:21:17 EDT 2002


I'm on a dial-up internet connection with little or no spam checking
for my mail inbox. So, I wrote "pop3filter.py", a small script (135
lines) that filters the POP3 communication between "localhost" and
your provider. Currently, it has but one feature:

- strip HTML mails to plaintext

Spam detection will be in the next version. My previous attempt at
stripping HTML mails involved hacking outlook and was thus only
usefull for outlook (and didn't work that good, I must admit); this
version should work much better, and for other email clients, too. 

The tool is only usefull if you have just one POP3 provider, its not
usefull for more providers (as of yet). Also, this is the very first
release, and although I would be very grateful for bug reports, you
might find the bugs not as pleasant as I'll find them.

Anyway, if I haven't scared you away, the installation goes like this:

- you need python2.2 (because of the "email" package. you might have
installed it separately, then it should work, too. (as long as you
have at least 2.0))

- it was tested on Windows 2000 using Microsoft Outlook as mail
client. (Thats' why I was looking for a HTML-mail-stripper in the
first place ;). Your mileage may vary. 

- download the file http://p-nand-q.com/python/pop3filter.zip and
extract it

- edit the line that says

# you have to edit this line to point to your POP3 server. 
REMOTE_POP3_SERVER = ""

so for example it could read

REMOTE_POP3_SERVER = "mail.server.internal.com"

or whatever - the line you would have used in the "pop3" line of your
email client.

- change your email client to get mail from localhost, rather than
whatever pop3 account you're on. Do not change any login settings -
the login settings are transparently sent by pop3filter.py

- start pop3filter, start email client, query for new mail. 

(If something goes terribly wrong, send me a bug report, stop
pop3filter, reset the changes to the pop3 settings in your email
client, and you should be fine again). 





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