Mail::Box : Tutorial Mail Filters

Mail::Box : Tutorial Mail Filters

By Mark Overmeer (‎markov‎) from Arnhem.pm, Amsterdam.pm
Date: Thursday, 24 July 2003 16:00
Duration: 95 minutes
Language:

Most Internet traffic (excluding X-rated images and illegal MP3
exchanges) is produced by e-mail. Every Internet user has at least
one e-mail address, and most people use that regularly both to send
as to receive mail.

Where web-sites and web-browser applications are dominated by only a
few implementations, are there an incredible amount of applications
to handle e-mail. The variety of (mis-)features in these applications
cause programmers major head-aches.

For a long time, Perl has its own e-mail handling facilities. E-mail is
rather complicated, and therefore a Perl implementation is not the
preferred choice for a common mail user agents (MUAs). However, Perl
can play an important role in automatic e-mail processing, like spam
and virus filtering.

This tutorial tells about the history of e-mail related Perl modules.
It demonstrates how filters can be built based on Mail::Box and related
modules. New features like unicode support and use of User::Identity
are highlighted. Shown is how a text alternative can be added to an
html-only message, how to use SpamAssassin, and simple ways to clean-up
and convert existing folders.

This tutorial is new. It has some overlap with talks about Mail::Box
on earlier conferences, but from a different perspective.