Mail Avenger - Recommended Software

Recommended Software

The author of Mail Avenger uses the following software packages in conjunction with Mail Avenger. These certainly aren't necessary for using Mail Avenger, but some of them are used in the examples in the tips section of the web site.

ClamAV - A free antivirus package that can check email messages for viruses. Great for use in a bodytest script to block viruses attempting to mail themselves to you.
Dovecot - An IMAP server that appears to handle large maildir directories very efficiently. Works well in pre-auth mode over SSH, so you don't need to set up any new servers to read mail someplace you already have a shell account.
Gnus - A mail and news reader for emacs (and XEmacs) that deals well with reading mail from multiple mailboxes. Gnus is quite useful in conjunction with avenger.local if you deliver different classes of mail to different mailboxes. It allows you to set characteristics of outgoing mail that differ depending on which mailbox you are reading.
Gnus is also probably the best IMAP-capable mail reader for emacs, if you wish to read mail from different client machines without the latency of an interactive remote login session. The only downside is that large mailboxes can be impractically slow with some IMAP servers. Fortunately, Dovecot seems to solve the problem. To use Dovecot from Gnus, you can put something like the following in your .gnus file (substituting the appropriate values for my-imap-server and my-imap-inbox):
```
(setq my-imap-server "YOUR.SERVER.NAME")
(setq my-imap-inbox "/PATH/TO/YOUR/INBOX/")

(setq my-imap-method
      `(nnimap ,my-imap-server
	       (imap-shell-program
		(,(concat
		   "ssh -ax -o\"BatchMode yes\" "
		   my-imap-server
		   " exec env MAIL=" my-imap-inbox
		   " /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap")))
	       (nnimap-stream shell)))
(setq gnus-select-method my-imap-method)
(setq gnus-message-archive-method my-imap-method)
```
Procmail - One of the best known mail filters and local delivery agents. It comes with a utility called formail that lets you extract headers from mail messages. Very useful in writing certain bodytest scripts.
SpamAssassin - A highly-effective, free spam filter incorporating a large collection of different techniques for fighting spam. One of the inspirations for Mail Avenger was building a system that allowed individual users to run SpamAssassin with their own preferences during an SMTP transaction.

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