Re: [RFR] templates://mailagent/{templates.master}
On Thu, 7 Feb 2008 06:32:40 +0100, Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> said:
> I would very welcome comments by Manoj who maintains the package as he
> generally has quite precise ideas about how things should be
> written...
Ah. I guess my first reaction was to question the rationale of
making all interactions impersonal; I quite enjoyed the interactions
with HAL in Clark's novel. I get a warm fuzzy feeling when my computer
talks to me personally, as opposed to a banal robotic intonation. I am
not sure that banality translates to ease of understanding for
non-native speakers; and I consider the chatty interactions as a
stylistic issue.
However. That is a discussion for another day.
: Mailagent processes mail automatically.
Umm. Processes how? (I know I wrote the same line, almost, but
stripping it off the users intent to process seems to make the meaning
less clear).
Mailagent is a Mail Delivery Agent, if one wants to be
pedantically impersonal. As an MDA, it is more powerful than procmail;
but that alone does not provide as much information to the end user as
the fact that it is the swiss army knife of MDA's. That aspect of
mailagent, previously provided by the humorous mechanism of the phrase
"It slices, it dices, .." has been lost in the translation.
Obeying lex-like rulesets, mailagent can file mails to specific
folders (plain Unix-style folders and also MMDF and MH ones),
forward messages to third parties, pipe them to commands or post
them to newsgroups. It can process commands contained in the
messages and the filtering commands can be extended.
The commands contained in the mesage and the filtering commands
are not the same beastie; perhaps the sentence needs to be broken.
Here is my take on it:
,----
| Mailagent is a mail delivery agent, and can be programmed to
| respond to mail in ways more sophisticated than a mail filtering
| program like procmail. It is easy to configure, and very easy to
| extend using Perl. Not only can the base functionality be
| extended, new commands and processing methods can be added in a
| modular fashion.
|
| Obeying lex-like rulesets, mailagent can file mails to specific
| folders (plain Unix-style folders and also MMDF and MH ones),
| forward messages to third parties, pipe them to commands or post
| them to newsgroups. The filtering commands that are executed on
| the messages can be extended, and may rewrite the message headers
| or body as desired. It can also create and process commands based
| on key words contained in the body of the mail message.
|
| Mailagent can be used as a vacation program, and can answer mail
| automatically and with more flexibility than the command of that
| name. A template can be provided for the body of the response,
| and the frequency of vacation mails can also be specified. Simple
| macro substitutions allow parts of the mail header to be recycled
| into the vacation messages, for a more personalized reply.
|
| Mailagent can also be used to set up a generic mail server,
| without the hassle of the lower-level concerns like error
| recovery, logging or command parsing.
|
| Please note that on Debian systems, mailagent requires a catch-all
| rule saving all mail into the user's home directory. Unlike other
| Mail Delivery Agents such as procmail, mailagent is too extensible
| to be safely made setgid mail, and so cannot lock /var/spool/mail
| mailboxes.
`----
manoj
--
It is better never to have been born. But who among us has such luck?
One in a million, perhaps.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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