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Sunday, December 01, 2002

Assassination!

Warning! Incredibly geeky post ahoy!

So, I have just spent the last 8 hours (I should say 12 days, just as a coverup for my latest bout with non-posting) trying to install SpamAssassin.

I was armed with a handy printout of Ben Trott's fantastic set of OS X specific instructions and a fresh OS X Developer Tools CD.

Everything started out smoothly. The Dev Tools took half an hour to install and configure themselves, during which time I had some tea and watched my boyfriend paint. Very relaxing.

Once I actually got to *typing in the terminal*... well, things went a bit pear-shaped. So we went out for chinese food and watched Trading Spaces. Then I worked on assassinating some more spam.

SpamAssassin required the installation of a new version of perl, along with 14 module thingies -- actually, it required 15, one of which (HTML::Parser) wasn't listed in the instructions. I got 'em all going with the help of pigtails and some kind of folk on IRC: RandallX, Fugu and Mako (eep). Thanks all!

Basically, SpamAssassin now logs onto my mail server and downloads my mail like a regular email program. It goes through the mails and works its mojo, marking up the Subject lines in various ways to denote which mails are spam and which are not. Then I simply tell my email program to read the text file that SpamAssassin outputs, every time I hit "Check Mail".

Unfortunately, my email program, Eudora, doesn't read text files with unix line endings.

So now I'm stuck. I can convert the line endings fairly trivially by hand with BBEdit or a quick AppleScript... but I have to make sure it's in unix format every time the SpamAssassin background app runs, and that it's in Mac format every time I hit "Check Mail" in Eudora.

The only advice I've come across is "switch to Mail.app" but it seems the newest versions of Mail have removed the ability to read from a text file altogether. Plus I've always found Mail.app to be alarmingly slow when used with large mailboxes (I keep about 250mb of mail on hand at any given time).

Anybody out there nerdy enough to have a solution for me? I think what I need is some kind of shell script but I have no idea how to work 'em. Bleh.

Tuesday Update: I've given up on this momentarily and gone back to letting Eudora check my email the normal way. SpamAssassin's scanner was very slow (it took about 7 minutes to load and process 70 emails; I'd give it the benefit of the doubt by saying that most were large mailing list digests, but Eudora was able to suck in the same messages in a matter of less than 10 seconds) and changing the line endings from unix to Mac quickly got tedious, especially since folders like /var/mail are hidden from "normal" Mac applications. I would still love a good spam filter but right now I'm going to investigate getting something installed at the ISP level. I'm sure you're all devasted.

Posted at 12:44 AM

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