Re: idea: "pipe" filter / procmail

On 20-Oct-2004 Dan Jacobson wrote:
> But never mind that. Introducing pipes.
> As we know, procmail is useful for incoming mail, but what about
> incoming news? Assuming noffle is the right place to do it. Then a new
> type of filter, "pipe <shell command>" would be useful.
> Probably mostly we would just "pipe procmail".

I rather like this idea. The pipe overhead could be carefully tailored to
articles where you think you might need it.

Things are slightly complicated internally, because filters fire at the
overview collection stage, not at article body collection. But we could add the
filter command to the request for the article text that causes the subsequent
article collection.

So article comes in and if a pipe request is active it is sent to the pipe.

> Noffle must be the right place to do the pipe, just as exim, and not
> one's mail reader, calls procmail.
> [...]
> Oh, and if our pipe filter fires, we should still also be able to say
> the message has not yet been "delivered", so we can have our pancakes
> and eat them too. I.e., still read the announcement.

To my mind there's a slight difference between piping a mail message to
procmail for end user delivery and putting it into the newsbase for reading by
potentially anybody. I'm inclined to say that articles should always be put into
the newbase.

I suppose one filter use might be a spam/virus/malware detector, in which case
cancelling the article from the newsbase would be the right thing to do. Or
maybe (so as not to break threading) removing the article body and replacing it
with a 'Article removed for your own good' type message.

-- 
Jim Hague - [email protected]          Never trust a computer you can't lift.


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