mail filter in python?

[Cameron Laird]

In article <14495.11639.467461.357073 at beluga.mojam.com>,
Skip Montanaro  <skip at mojam.com> wrote:
>
>    Cameron> In any case, I agree with Mr. Wouters: use procmail, and just
>    Cameron> invoke your Python work as an external process.
>
>Worth noting that the procmail tips page at 
>
>    http://www.procmail.org/jari/pm-tips.html
>
>mentions Lua as a possible replacement for the procmail language (see the
>end of question 3.5).  That item was presumably added about two years ago,
>so I tend to think it's either very hard to do or didn't generate enough
>steam in the procmail community.  If such a thing was possible with Lua, it
>would likely be possible with Python as well.  Anyone for "pluggable
>brains"?
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Good points.

I'm sending a copy of this to Jari Aalto, who might be
able to help.  My purely personal speculation is, the
latter:  "it ... didn't generate enough steam in the
procmail community."  I'll grossly generalize that the
mailing-agent communities tend to regard C as the
natural language for all implementations, and see little
advantage to such distractions as higher-level scripting.
Lua is very simple to interface, unless some catastrophic
surprise turned up specifically with the procmail work.

Yes, of course Python is also quite simple to interface.

There's another complexity that's timely to mention now.
Mailing-agent work tends to be hilariously non-orthogonal;
stuff pops in from all directions.  Filtering is making
its way back upstream into the 800-pound gorilla of the
mail-transfer agent market, sendmail; see the mention of
the "content management API" (what I usually call Milter)
in <URL:http://sendmail.net/?feed=interview810-2>.  As
someone noted, it would be good also to know where Sieve
and Sift-Mail are headed.  So:  the problem in this area
that the original questioner has is that there are too
many answers.
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html