mail filter in python?

[Jari Aalto+mail.emacs]

* Mon 2000-02-07 Cameron Laird <claird at starbase.neosoft.com> mail.misc
| ,
| 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"?

Correct. I don't know how procmail integrates to the current language,
but I have feeling that it it pretty tight bound to the current 
implementation. 

There were a discussion in the Emacs list about replacing the
obscure and 'distant-to-anynone' language Emacs-Lisp with some other
pluggable language like Perl (An there is/was already a prototype
about this), but the general reaction was that Emasc was too bound to
lisp already.

      "Perlmacs -- Perl as Emacs extension language"
        http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/JTOBEY/

XEmacs team may get serious with pluggable language modules at some time,
since the core is more modular than in Emacs.


| 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.

I checked the lua and seemed quite interesting, if there is
a way to hook it into procmail I'd be interested too. 
Philip? [the current procmail maintainer]

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

jari