I always used a different email address for each web site and each mailing-list. Sorting incoming email to the right folders is as simple as creating .qmail files.
But at the office, we don’t have multiple email addresses. All goes to a single mailbox. Corporate emails, spam, mailing-lists, bug reports, everything goes in the same POP3 account with the same envelope recipient.
Fetchmail is known to be bogus, so until now I used getmail in order to fetch that email. Getmail did the job, but I never liked it. It’s slow: it needs 50% horsepower of a 2 Ghz VIA C7, that’s unacceptable for such a simple task. And the syntax is counterintuitive. And it’s unable to filter based on recipients without the need of external applications.
Maildrop is such an application. It’s supposed to be more user-friendly than Procmail. Sorry, but I never could stand it either. Forget a space or an useless unexpected coma after a closing parenthesis and you got a syntax error. Doing basic things is complicated. Sure, it works. But that’s yet another complicated piece to a simple puzzle.
Today, I tried FDM. Wow! That’s the mail client/delivery agent that I was looking for. Python could be uninstalled, as FDM is written in C++.
FDM can fetch email through POP/IMAP, it can filter it and deliver it muliple ways.
Finally! A piece of software without a brain-damaged syntax. The syntax is simple yet powerful. The TDM-based cache rocks. Rules can also include presence of attachments. It can track new and old messages. Working with regexes, multiple mailboxes and multiple destinations remains simple.
It’s fast. It’s portable. It works. It doesn’t lose mail when something is wrong in the configuration. It has no known security flaw.
It’s just perfect. Thanks a million to Nicholas Marriott for this beautiful piece of software.