Mail Filtering with Mail::Audit
by Simon Cozens
|
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4
Before we let the article in to the inbox, there's a long list of patterns at the end of the program which match known spam senders. We check the incoming mail against this list, and save it for analysis and reporting:
while (<DATA>) {
chomp;
next unless $from =~ /$_/i or $to =~ /$_/i;
print LOG "$from:$subject:Spam?\n";
$item->accept($folder."spam");
}
Now our final check for mail which doesn't appear to be for us:
if ($item->from !~ /simon/i and $item->cc !~ /simon/i) {
print LOG "$from:$subject:Badly addressed mail\n";
$item->accept("questionable")
}
Finally, we let the mail in:
print LOG "INCOMING MAIL:$from:$subject:
Accepting to inbox\n";
$item->accept();
Caveats
I'm perfectly happy to trust Mail::Audit with all my incoming email. For a while it was running alongside procmail, but now it rules the roost. However, there are some things which you do need to take care about if you want to run it yourself.
Mail::Audit has been tested on qmail and postfix - it should work fine on other MTAs (Message Transfer Agents), so long as they believe that exit 100; means reject. If they don't, you can override the reject method like this:
$item = Mail::Audit->new(
reject => sub { exit 67; }
);
It also assumes that the default mailbox is /var/spool/mail/name where name is user ID of the current user. If this isn't the case, (I believe mh doesn't work like this) say accept("Mailbox") or override accept with a subroutine of your own.
Finally, Mail::Audit isn't sophisticated. It's little other than a wrapper around Mail::Internet. While it's probably perfectly fine for most filters you want to write, don't expect it to do everything for you.
Conclusion
Mail::Audit and News::Gateway are both available from CPAN; together they allow you to very easily construct mail filters and newsgroup gateways in Perl. It's a great way to filter your mail with Perl, and an excellent replacement for moldy old procmail.
Copyright The Perl Journal. Reprinted with permission from CPM Media LLC. All rights reserved.
