pop-proc v1.0 ============= Copyright (C) Christi Alice Scarborough 1997 Email: ccs95@aber.ac.uk Distributed under the GNU public licence - see file COPYING for details NO WARRANTY - this software is UNSUPPORTED - use at your own risk Abstract -------- pop-proc is a simple POP mail client, written in Perl. It does not perform any processing on the mail itself, but is designed to pass mail on to another program (such as procmail) for handling. It can be run from the command line, but is most effective when invoked from a cron job, or run detached in the background (see below). It is designed to be fairly robust, and it is very unlikely to lose any of your mail. Prerequisites ------------- pop-proc runs under Perl 5 on a UNIX system. You may be able to get it to work on other systems by fiddling with the configuration information at the top of the file. In addition, pop-proc requires a POP3 server to connect to. Disclaimer ---------- pop-proc is a quick and dirty hack that I cobbled together for my own nefarious purposes. I just thought that others might possibly find it useful too. It should be considered UNSUPPORTED, but if you send me email about it, I will reply when I have time. It is not likely that I will be enhancing pop-proc any further. Configuration ------------- Before you start, you MUST edit the program file and change the configuration parameters at the top of the file. Be aware that, since your POP mailbox password is stored as plain text in this file, the file should not be group or world readable. To make sure, tyoe chmod 700 pop-proc at the command line. I know this represents something of a security risk. However, anyone with sufficient knowledge and read access to your files could have defeated any encryption I could place in the program anyway, so I decided that it just wasn't worth bothering about. Usage ----- From the command line ./pop-proc runs the program once only, collecting and processing your mail. ./pop-proc -b runs the program in the background. It will process your mail at fixed intervals specified by the time limit. If you want to run pop-proc as a cron job, add the following line to your crontab list 0 * * * * /pop-proc > /dev/null This will process mail on the hour, every hour. That's all there is to it. Revision Information -------------------- 31st Oct 1997 - first release Legal Gibberish --------------- This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.