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Re: audience for a procmail book?

1996-03-15 13:04:41

Based on helpful comments from many of you, I'm going to update 3 to be:

   3] Windows, Macintosh, OS/2, Amiga, etc. users whose mail is
      delivered to a Unix server and who access their mail folder(s) 
      using either IMAP or POP


Excellent. I think this book will fit in well with oreilly. A good
book on this nether region (as someone else so aptly put it) is sorely
needed. 


The last three groups are dependent upon the first for some basic mailer
setup (e.g. installing procmail properly in the first place) which, at
least in my opinion, somewhat rules them out, at least if the book is ONLY
about procmail. I know how difficult it can be to have ones own
organization install procmail. 

Yes, it's true that these last groups are dependent on system
administrators to install procmail, but I don't think this rules them out
of the audience.  I actually think that the majority of the audience will
be people in these last three groups, i.e., users like me.  But I don't
know... Out of curiosity, how many people on this list are system
administrators? 

Well, I am for one. That doesn't preclude the book from being used by
a user though. Perhaps brief reviews of some of the remote access clients
would be helpful (just an idea). Popular programs like elm, pine, eudora,
and pegasus would fill in this gap. (skip mh, it's already got a book, though
indicating how procmail works with MH should be included)


Since you didn't exactly specify what the book will be about, I'll take
the liberty to suggest some things which in my opinion are necessary to
get the aforementioned audience: 
 - interaction of procmail with the rest of the email 'machine' (e.g. 
sendmail (complete reference about '.forward' files...))
 - installing procmail in one's home-directory (and ONLY there)
 - interaction of procmail and popclient (because I am using exactly this 
combination)

Yes, all good suggestions.  For the last one, interacting with a POP
client, I have a question for you: What types of things do you do with
procmail?  Do you filter messages into different folders and, if so, is
your POP client able to access those folders? 


global filters
local filters
fax mail processing
auto-responders
simple reflectors
request-for-instruction services
auto-registration services
auto-sorting into inboxes
handling multiple people (user+arg is extremely useful)

Some of these overlap with others

My few cents about IMAP: Being able to read mail only when the phone line
is up is a large disadvantage. IMAP is only practical (as far as I know,
that is) when you don't want to remove your mail from the remote host
which doesn't fit the large majority of PC users connected through a

I'm going to avoid a POP vs. IMAP discussion here but if anyone is
interested my views are pretty much aligned with Terry Gray's, which are
described here: 

ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap.vs.pop


I see them as being complementary. 
POP is good for dial-up grab it and go connections where a remote user
will always be using the same PC (perhaps a field engineer or salesman)

IMAP is good for LAN based systems, or for systems where you have
somebody that uses a workstation and a PC and HAS to have the mail
spool left on the server AND synchronized for a later dial-up connection.

Pronto mail is a POP client that comes close to providing this, but not
quite..


--
____________________________________________________________________________
Doug Hughes                                     Engineering Network Services
System/Net Admin                                Auburn University
                        doug(_at_)eng(_dot_)auburn(_dot_)edu
                Pro is to Con as progress is to congress

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