[imapfilter-devel] whishes

[Lefteris Chatzibarbas]

On Sat, May 15, 2004 at 02:44:32PM +0200, Cyrille Lefevre wrote:
> "Lefteris Chatzibarbas" <lefcha at hellug.gr> wrote:
> > On Sat, May 15, 2004 at 01:29:32PM +0200, Cyrille Lefevre wrote:
> > > do you thing it would be possible to implement open/read/write/close
> > > to a socket to communicate w/ other programs such as sendmail ?
> > 
> > There is a Lua library named "luasocket" that makes it possible to do
> > socket programming in Lua.
> 
> that's pretty good. so, most of the code may probably rewritten in lua, no ? :)
> do you think about that ?

Yes, if all the needed modules were available, one could write imapfilter in
Lua.  One could, also, write imapfilter in some other high level language, such
as Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. that have the relevant modules,  and probably much
quicker than in C.

But personally I don't like using any of these languages for general purpose
programming.  I find C high level enough and with the addition of Lua as a
configuration/extension/embedded language, C+Lua is the perfect combination for
me.

> 
> > > another interresting feature would have to have a deliver function
> > > w/ file locking, so imapfilter would be enable to replace the couple
> > > fetchmail/procmail to speadup things a lot.
> > 
> > Yes, it may seem as a good idea to add more features, but then
> > imapfilter wouldn't be an "IMAP mail filtering utility", but other
> > things, too.  I try to keep imapfilter small and make it do one specific
> > thing well...
> 
> the advantage of the "new" imapfilter over procmail is the lua language.
> not that lua is more powerfull than procmail rules, but, at least, mixed
> and/or rules are a pain to write using procmail, not using lua. also, the
> chain would be more simple using imapfilter w/ such functionnalities. the
> one I have, right now, is fetchmail -> sendmail -> procmail -> deliver,
> using imapfilter, it would be : imapfilter :) of course, I may already
> use only imapfilter since I also have an IMAP server, but delivering to
> mailboxes would be mush faster and simple than using an IMAP server.
> 
> > A user can easily write messages to the filesystem using Lua and I may
> > add, after 1.0, auxiliary functions that will save messages to the
> > filesystem in mbox, maildir, etc. format.

As I already said, I can add auxiliary functions in the future that will save
the messages in the filesystem in mbox/maildir format.  It may be considered
part of imapfilter, since you process messages but instead of sending them in
some IMAP folder, you append them in a local mailbox.