Package: mailagent (3.73-23) [universe]

An automatic mail-processing tool and filter.

Mailagent allows you to process your mail automatically. This has far more functionality than procmail, and is easier to configure (providing, of course, that you grok perl). As a mail processing tool, this slices, it dices, it ...

Given a set of lex-like rules, you are able to file mails to specific folders (plain Unix-style folders and also MMDF and MH ones), forward messages to a third person, pipe a message to a command or even post the message to a newsgroup.

It is also possible to process messages containing some commands.

You may also set up a vacation program, which will automatically answer your mail while you are not there, but more flexibly than the Unix command of the same name. You only need to supply a message to be sent and the frequency at which this will occur. Some simple macro substitutions allow you to re-use some parts of the mail header into your vacation message, for a more personalized reply.

You may also set up a generic mail server, without the hassle of the lower-level concerns like error recovery, logging or command parsing.

The mailagent is not usually invoked manually but is rather called via the filter program, which is in turn invoked by sendmail. That means you must have sendmail/smail on your system to use this. You also must have perl to run the mailagent scripts.

It is possible to extend the mailagent filtering commands by implementing them in perl and then having them automagically loaded when used.

Please note that on Debian systems, mailagent can not lock /var/spool/mail directory mailboxes, and thus one must put a catch all rule saving all mail in ones home directory. This is because Debian MDA policy requires them to be setgid mail, and making anything as extensible as mailagent setgid anything negates any benefit of having group permission protection.