Introduction to FollowMeEmail Neda Document Number: 105-104-01 Last Updated: 2000/03/23 20:45:41 Doc. Revision: 1.1.1.1 November 24, 1999 Contents 1 FollowMeEmail * * 2 1.1 FollowMeEmail is Open Source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . * *. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2 FollowMeEmail Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . * *. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2.1 Fetchmail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .* * . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2.2 Procmail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . * *. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2.3 Cygwin and the NT port . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . * *. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.2.4 Web Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .* * . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 List of Figures 1 Overview of FollowMeEmail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .* * . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 FollowMeEmail Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . * *. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1 Acknowledgements FollowMeEmail is based upon three open-source software packages: Fetchmail, by * *Eric Raymond et al, Procmail by Stephen R. Van der Berg et al., and the EMSD server agent by Neda Communication* *s, Inc. The NT port of FollowMeEmail would have been much more difficult (if not com* *pletely infeasible) without Cygnus Solutions' CygWin package. With CygWin we found it almost trivial to pro* *duce running versions of Fetchmail and Procmail on NT. We're deeply grateful for the existence of all these tools and to all the pe* *ople who've brought them into being. For more information on Fetchmail, see the Fetchmail home page http://www.tu* *xedo.org/"esr/fetchmail. Information on Procmail is available at http://www.procmail.org CygWin information is at http://www.cygnus.com/cygwin. More information on EMSD can be found at http://www.emsd.org. 1 FollowMeEmail The FollowMeEmail system has the ability to watch over all incoming messages fr* *om your own desktop. Its continu- ous monitoring capability is able to track all of your messages, filter them, a* *nd manage them in the way you want it. Several advantages of having FollowMeEmail in the system are: - Optionally filters the junk mail. - Optionally combines multiple mailboxes. - Filters and forwards important and urgent messages. - Filters are web accessible - ..... There are two modes of FollowMeEmail: 1. Completely Passive: this mode does not interfere with the user's main mail* * applications. This mode only uses FollowMeEmail as a tracking device in monitoring all the incoming messages. 2. Integrated with the mail user agent: this mode can use all of the optional* * features that are avilable in Fol- lowMeEmail in addition to the user's main mail applications. Figure 1 is the overview of FollowMeEmail. As you can see in Figure 1, you d* *o not need to be at work or in front of your desktop all the time to receive important and urgent email. With Follow* *MeEmail, all of the important and urgent messages will be forwarded and delivered to your Palm device, pager, cel* *lular phone, fax, etc. Figure 2 shows the architecture of FollowMeEmail. 2 Figure 1: Overview of FollowMeEmail 3 Figure 2: FollowMeEmail Architecture 4 1.1 FollowMeEmail is Open Source More and more people are becoming "open-source" believer. The open-source commu* *nity has proposed the use of open-source development model as one possible way to face many challenges in gr* *owing the business in today's fast-moving and competitive industry environment. - It gets us on the desktop more easily. - They trust us. - Based on other open-source and open protocols. 1.2 FollowMeEmail Architecture FollowMeEmail is based upon two well-known open-source tools: fetchmail and pro* *cmail. 1.2.1Fetchmail Fetchmail is a mail-retrieval and forwarding utility. Fetchmail allows remote a* *ccess to a user's mail via any existing Internet mail-retrieval protocol, including any flavor of IMAP or POP. It can t* *hen forward the mail to any SMTP- or ESMTP-compliant mail server, or directly to a mail delivery agent like procmail* *. Some other useful tools of Fetchmail are: - merge multiple mail streams into a single mailbox. - peek at your home email from work while leaving it in its regular box for * *you to retrieve when you get home. Fetchmail supports every email-related protocol known to humanity and can be* * run as a background daemon or from the command line. There's also a GUI-based configuration tool available fo* *r its text-based command file. For much more information, see the fetchmail home page at http://www.tuxedo.* *org/"esr/fetchmail. 1.2.2Procmail Procmail is a dazzlyingly flexible mail filtering tool, which can split differe* *nt mail into different folders (to sort mailing lists, for example), junk spam, run any program on receipt of any kind of mail,* * etc., etc. Procmail is an unparalleled suite of email filtering tools, allowing you to * *do things like: - filter and selectively forward (or discard) mail based upon arbitrary crit* *eria. - run different programs upon receipt of different kinds of mail (for exampl* *e, to ring different kinds of bells when urgent and non-urgent messages arrive). - generate automatic replies to mail. There is an add-on package to Procmail called SmartList that's our favorite * *for maintaining email mailing lists. For more information on Procmail, see the procmail home page at http://www.p* *rocmail.org 5 1.2.3Cygwin and the NT port Both Fetchmail and Procmail were originally developed for Unix. Neither would h* *ave been easy (or perhaps even possible!) to port to NT without the help of CygWin, a tool from Cygnus Solutio* *ns that's designed to allow one to do just this sort of thing: port open-source Unix software to NT. 1.2.4Web Interface Both fetchmail and procmail are a bit complex to configure for the nontechnical* * user, so we provide a web interface to allow the user to manipulate both tools to accomplish common forwarding and * *filtering tasks. Sophisticated users still have access to the raw configuration files and can* * make fetchmail and procmail sit up and beg should they wish. 6