I've been observing with interest the discussion generated on the
SmartList mailing list following my inquiry into the state of SmartList
development. I had no idea what kind of a hornet's nest I was throwing
rocks at.
It appears from the discussion that there is some interest in improving
SmartList and getting procmail going again. My employer, Zanshin, is a
developer of open-source email management tools and is interested in
procmail and SmartList because of their versatility and the wealth of
existing resources (such as the SpamBouncer) available. We naturally are
more interested in a thriving application than in one that is gradually
fading away, so I'd like to encourage some more discussion along the lines
of a procmail revival.
One detail that is of concern to Zanshin is the restriction on derivative
works that Stephen put in the procmail license. I've already tried to
contact him a couple of times and received no response. Does anyone out
there know how to reach him?
I've set up a mailing list
procmail-future(_at_)zanshin(_dot_)com
for further discussion. It's run with SmartList, so subscribe by sending
a message
To: procmail-future-request(_at_)zanshin(_dot_)com
Subject: subscribe
The purpose of this list is to collect procmail and SmartList bug reports
and patches, along with general wish-list items or other suggestions, to
find out just what it would take to make SmartList worthwhile and to nudge
procmail 3.11 out of the "pre7" state and into a real release.
As a first contribution to this effort, here's an extremely simple bug fix
for the "multigram" program to address a problem that was mentioned on the
"Ongoing development" thread:
On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, mark david mcCreary wrote:
A big problem is that it does not handle different level of domain
nodes correctly. That is, joe(_at_)email(_dot_)msn(_dot_)com does not match
up to
joe(_at_)msn(_dot_)com(_dot_) Very frustrating for both joe and the
listmaster.
Multigram is *intended* to handle different levels of domain properly, but
there's an obvious logic error in an important subroutine of the matching
algorithm. With the fix below, match scores increase significantly for
addresses that differ only in the qualification of domain naming.
--- src/multigram.c.0 Wed Sep 16 17:56:46 1998
+++ src/multigram.c Fri Oct 9 15:25:54 1998
@@ -184,7 +184,7 @@
{ const char*p;
while(p=strchr(str,'@')) /* find the last '@' sign */
str=p+1;
- return (char*)p;
+ return (char*)str;
}
static void lowcase(str)struct string*const str; /* make lowercase */
--
Bart Schaefer Zanshin
Chief Scientist http://www.zanshin.com