On Wed, 14 Jan 1998 20:03:03 -0600 "Woodhouse, Gregory J."
<gregory(_dot_)woodhouse(_at_)med(_dot_)va(_dot_)gov> wrote:
I'm afraid I'm a little confused by what you mean here unless you have
in mind the practical difficulty involved in having POP3 accounts and
the like act upon messages in a timely manner. In terms of
functionality, I can't think of any filtering task I can perform on
the MS Exchange system I use here that I cannot perform on my Internet
account. But in all fairness, on my other account I run procmail on
the UNIX box that is also the POP/IMAP server. I can certainly
appreciate that most ISPs would be reluctant to allow customers to set
up their own procmail recipes. In fact, when I do recommend procmail
to people I usually practically stand on my head to convince them that
they should have someone who knows what they're doing set it up and
then test things *carefully*.
OK. There are many examples, including "procmail" and "vacation", of
systems that do the desired kind of rule based processing of incoming
messages. These systems express the desired rule functionality, but
the do not address the issue of *managing* the rule set appropriately
when using distributed (POP or IMAP) clients. The advantage that
proprietary systems currently enjoy is the ability to manage rulesets
that are configured in one application and executed in another application.
They are able to do this because they have complete control over the entire
architecture at all times -- the definition of "proprietary" system.
We seek to build a system that standardizes the useful and reasonably well
known features of "procmail" like rule systems AND make it appropriate for
use in a multivendor, standard architecture.
---
Steve