FollowMeEmail is currently supported on Solaris (version 2.5.1 and higher) and on Windows NT 4.0. A Linux port should be easy, since two of the three pieces (fetchmail and procmail) already run on Linux. We haven't done portation and testing yet for the package as a whole on Linux; if you want to do this and send us the results, please do! We'll make them available as part of the standard distribution.
The NT 4.0 port requires the CygWin package, available from Cygnus Solutions at www.cygnus.com/cygwin. We used the beta 20.1 version for development, but there's also now a released supported version available.
FollowMeEmail consists of three pieces:
Fetchmail, for retrieving messages;
Procmail, for filtering and forwarding;
The EMSD server agent: A message transfer agent for sending messages to wireless devices. Sendmail or other LAN-based message transfer agents may also be used with FollowMeEmail.
FollowMeEmail is a collection of mail-related Open Source and Free Software packages which has been bundled in a consistent and cohesive way. FollowMeEmail is about:
The FollowMeEmail system has the ability to watch over all incoming messages from your own desktop. Its continuous monitoring capability is able to track all of your messages, filter them, and manage them in the way you want it. Several advantages of having FollowMeEmail in the system are:
There are two modes of FollowMeEmail:
Figure 3 is the overview of FollowMeEmail. As you can see in Figure 3, you do not need to be at work or in front of your desktop all the time to receive important and urgent email. With FollowMeEmail, all of the important and urgent messages will be forwarded and delivered to your Palm device, pager, cellular phone, fax, etc.
FollowMeEmail is based upon two well-known open-source tools: fetchmail and procmail.
Fetchmail is a mail-retrieval and forwarding utility. Fetchmail allows remote access to a user's mail via any existing Internet mail-retrieval protocol, including any flavor of IMAP or POP. It can then 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:
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 for its text-based command file.
For much more information, see the fetchmail home page at http://www.tuxedo.org/esr/fetchmail.
Procmail is a dazzlyingly flexible mail filtering tool, which can split different 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:
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.procmail.org
Both Fetchmail and Procmail were originally developed for Unix. Neither would have been easy (or perhaps even possible!) to port to NT without the help of CygWin, a tool from Cygnus Solutions that's designed to allow one to do just this sort of thing: port open-source Unix software to NT.
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.
More and more people are becoming ``open-source'' believer. The open-source community has proposed the use of open-source development model as one possible way to face many challenges in growing the business in today's fast-moving and competitive industry environment.
