From: Hal Fulton Date: 2004-11-11T05:51:44+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby and Mozilla? Bradley, Todd wrote: > Rather than worrying about dealing with Mozilla, why don't you take a > mailer-generic approach and deal with the mail separately? The POP3 > protocol is quite simple. There are two approaches you could take, > following in the footsteps of anti-virus programs that have done both of > these: Yes, well, I wasn't really looking for a Moz-specific solution... unless there was one that required less coding. > 1) Write a Ruby POP3 client that analyzes message in-situ and deletes > the ones off the server that you don't like. Then, when your regular > POP3 client (Mozilla in this case) goes to suck in mail off the server, > the spam's already gone. This is the approach taken by SpamEater Pro, > for instance. Yes, I thought of this, and it would be fairly easy. Trouble is, I spend *many* hours in front of the computer each day. My mail client is pretty much always up and it hits the server every 60 seconds. That makes a synchronization problem if I keep that usage habit. > 2) Write a Ruby POP3 client that sits between your mail reader and the > server. It acts as a proxy and listens on your local host's mail port. > You set your mail reader (Mozilla) to connect to localhost instead of > pop3.myisp.com. When the proxy gets a request for messages, it wakes up > and requests messages from your real server (pop3.myisp.com), then > passes through the ones it thinks aren't spam. This is the approach > taken by every anti-virus program I've seen. OK, I wouldn't mind doing this... but I'm not sure how to create a proxy. Do I actually run a real pop3 server or what? Duh? > One advantage of both of these approaches over your original idea is > that they're independent of the mail program. If, at some time in the > future, you drop Mozilla mail for Microsoft Outlook or whatever, your > anti-spam program will still work. Yes, a good idea. Someone mentioned Gurgitate, which looks cool... but again I don't know how to stick it in between my mail client and my remote pop server. Hal