Animail 2.0.12-1 review

Animail is a multiserver POP3/APOP/IMAP4 (with or without SSL) mail retrieval utility

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Juanjo A. Mart?nez

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Animail is a multiserver POP3/APOP/IMAP4 (with or without SSL) mail retrieval utility. As the tittle of this section suggests, Animail can be used with other external filters to combine his filtering skills with the ones already on Animail. Those filters (you can specify any number of them) will be called just after downloading a message and just before delivering it; depending of the return value of some output of that filter the message will be delivered, ignored, or copied to a log mailbox (so you can see if those filters are not deleting important mail). The commands discussed on the examples of this subsection are detailed on the command block reference.

Here are some key features of "Animail":
You can activate several filter to message size, maximun number of messages to download, or delete messages on the server based on a set of regular expressions written in a config file if they match the message header (in this case it will only download the header, not the entire message).
It can be combined with other mail filters (like SpamAssassin or Bogofilter) in a easy, elegant and documented way. This way Animail uses those programs like 'plugins' and can extends without limits his filtering capabilities, aplying those other filters-plugins to the mails just after they are downloaded and just before they are delivered, giving those other filters the change to decide if a mail is or is not spam.
It allows downloading mail from several mail servers and those can be written to a local mailbox with mbox format, a QMail style directory (unstable version), or better, be resent to a local SMTP like Sendmail (any SMTP is valid).
It can forward the downloaded mail to another email adress (if we have the SMTP option activated), or to a coma separeted list of adresses.
We can configure the download order of the messages based on his size (arrival order, first the bigger messages or first the smaller messages). This allows us, for example, to get first the smaller messages so we can start reading them while a multimegabyte message is being downloaded.
It has a silent mode with redirects all output to the system log instead of to the console. This is useful if we want to make script that periodically checks for mail (2 examples of this scripts are included in the distribution).
The program output is a lot more friendly that the one of Fetchmail and others MDAs. When it download a message shows the message origin, and a percentual indicator of the download of the message, over a total given in bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, terabytes depending of the message size (tired of huge bytesize digits? tired of dots?) [Current version supports colored output]
It has a good speed. In a fast computer (x86 350+), working in text mode and with the -t Switch enabled it can be faster than Fetchmail. The faster is the computer, the bigger is the difference. This only applies to local networks, on internet they are equally slow (internet is the bottleneck).
To quickly configure Animail after installation create a .animail directory on your home dir, copy the file /usr/share/doc/animail/animailrc and edit to your taste.