MAIL::AUDIT This is the 1.7 release of Mail::Audit, which includes both "popread" and "proc2ma". WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE? Now Mail::Audit supports a plug-in system; additional modules can provide methods for often-used recipes. For instance, Mail::Audit::KillDups checks for and surpresses duplicate messages. Oh, and a couple of fixes. OVERVIEW This is what Mail::Audit is all about: NAME Mail::Audit - Library for creating easy mail filters SYNOPSIS use Mail::Audit; my $mail = Mail::Audit->new; $mail->pipe("listgate p5p") if ($mail->from =~ /perl5-porters/); $mail->accept("perl) if ($mail->from =~ /perl/); $mail->reject("We do not accept spam") if looks_like_spam($mail); $mail->ignore if $mail->subject =~ /boring/i; ... DESCRIPTION procmail is nasty. It has a tortuous and complicated recipe format, and I don't like it. I wanted something flexible whereby I could filter my mail using Perl tests. `Mail::Audit' was inspired by Tom Christiansen's audit_mail and deliverlib programs. It allows a piece of email to be logged, examined, accepted into a mailbox, filtered, resent elsewhere, rejected, and so on. It's designed to allow you to easily create filter programs to stick in a .forward file or similar. POPREAD Why should you use popread? POP3 mailboxes can collect lots of messages, which you then download, all at once. And every time your local delivery agent tries to deliver each message through your .forward or .qmail, it has to fork off a new copy of Perl, which has to load up Mail::Audit and its dependent modules, and so on. When you're downloading 100 messages, this can drive your load average through the roof. popread takes care of POP access, filtering and local delivery all in one process, which is much faster and more efficient. Oh, and it deletes duplicate mail from the POP3 server, so you're not downloading the same message over and over again (Think a message to a mailing list, Cc'd to you) saving you bandwidth too. You don't have to use popread, but if you do, it requires the Mail::POP3Client module from CPAN. Remember to add your filter code to it, and set up your POP3 accounts, before attempting to run the program. PROC2MA This is a very early version of a program which automatically converts your legacy procmail rc files into Mail::Audit filters. Don't expect it to work flawlessly on complex rcs. If you want to use it, you need the Parse::RecDescent module from CPAN. BUG FIXES AND SUGGESTIONS I heartily welcome bug fixes, suggestions and patches to Mail::Audit. Please mail them to me at simon@cpan.org. Also, please feel free to mail me if you'd like to informed about future versions of Mail::Audit, or if you have any problems with the module. Simon