On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Wolfgang Pfeiffer wrote:
> Hi,
> I need some detailed (or at least *some* good) documentation on how to
> set up spam filters with fetchmail. I'd like to know how to delete mails,
> addressed to me, with fetchmail on my ISP's machines (protocol=POP3)
> *without* the need for downloading them.
>
> Or some info on how to send back mails, having a 'unsubscribe' in the
> subject line, to the sender (and *not* to the list that delivered it to
> the machines of my ISP); and again: without the need for downloading such
> mail.
> Or doesn't have fetchmail the options to do this?
>
> ... running fetchmail with procmail (and Pine) on my machine.
>
Unfortuantly what you want isn't possible. Well it is but the 'with out
downloading' part isn't. With POP, untill you download the message there is
now way for you to see what's in it. You've also got no ability to resend
or otherwise manipulate it. Everything you want to do though is possible
with fetchmail, or more specifically procmail, but you have to download it
first. This is partially a limitation of fetchmail and partially a
limitation of POP.
There is a 'top' command under POP that lets you look at the first lines of
a message with out downloading the rest of it (this is fetchmails way of
downloading a messasge without marking it as read) but not all servers
support it. Fetchmail doens't let you use this for filtering anyway. If
you're using IMAP then fetchmail will discard a message after only reading
it's headers if the smtp mda is is passing it onto gives a 500 error but
that's not relevent here. For your second task you'd still need to download
the email anyway to resend it.
>From the fetchmail FAQ:
G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?
Probably not. Most of the feature suggestions I get are for ways to
set various kinds of administrative policy or add more spam filtering
(the most common one, which I used to get about four million times a
week and got really tired of, is for tin-like kill files).
You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on the
server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf domain
exclusions. You can do other policy things better with the mda option
and script wrappers around fetchmail. If it's a
prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a wrapper
script called from crontab would do the job.
I'm not going to do these; fetchmail's job is transport, not policy,
and I refuse to change it from doing one thing well to attempting many
things badly. One of my objectives is to keep fetchmail simple so it
stays reliable.
M.
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