Dripmail


Introduction

Dripmail transforms a Unix MBOX file into a set of web pages. It was
designed to support the site: http://www.trenchant.org/dripmail/


Requirements

Perl 5
The following Perl modules:
	Email::Folder
	Email::Simple
	HTML::Template
	HTML::FromText
	Config::Natural
These should all be available on CPAN.
Mail in the standard mbox format.


Installation

Gunzip and untar dripmail.tar.gz into a directory of your
choosing. Configure it by editing dripmail.conf - be sure to point it to
the proper directories and make sure those directories are
writable, and point it to a unix mbox file. (Those usually live in
/your/home/directory/mail/mailfolder)   

To customize the look edit messages.templ.

To generate the pages, run the script dripmail.pl

You probably will want to use procmail or a similar system to route mail
into a specific mbox folder, and possibly trigger the dripmail.pl script
to update the site automatically. I highly suggest using a whitelist - a
good starting point for that is:

http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/12/spam-filtering.html

I also highly suggest stripping HTML and MIME attachments - dripmail does
not do this automatically. I use Stripmime: 

http://www.phred.org/~alex/stripmime.html 

An example procmail configuration is included in the distribution as
procmail.example.

Issues

This was written as a hack for my own site - it may or may not be useful
to you. It keeps mail in the mbox format which is useful since normal mbox
tools (like pine and friends) can be used to manage the system, but it's
certainly not the most efficient way to do it. Dripmail is probably not
suitable for archiving a massive mailing list or similar things. It also
(very) ineffeciently regenerates the whole site (with archives) when
running the script - that should probably be changed or at least
configurable. (I will do that... eventually, maybe.)


Bugs

There are probably lots. Please contact me and I will try to fix them, but
keep in mind I am very lazy and may never actually fix them.


Adam Mathes
dripmailsupport@adammathes.com
http://www.adammathes.com
2/25/2004
