Rated 3 out of 5 stars

by EdBot on Jan. 19, 2014 · permalink

I agree with delicacy that it would be very nice to have this add-on maintained, and I appreciate the links to the 1.3beta version. I see a number of requests 'out there' asking for some way to take particular actions based on the content of incoming mail messags. Filtaquilla does this to some extent, but if the action if dependent upon the actual content of the body of the message, it is not obvious how to do it.

A work-around which will allow using whatever external package one might want to use for the actual (regex) searching is to use the 'run file' of Filtaquilla. This will run an executable of one's choice, passing to it the messages subject as arg[1] and the message-id as arg[2]. As an example, the following bash script (the target of the 'fun file' action) will extract the block bewteen the message-id and the next "^From -":

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#!/bin/bash

# filtaquilla passes 2 args:
# subject is $1; message id is $2

MSGID=$2

INBOX={path to your profile's}/INBOX

LOGFILE={wherever you wish to put it}

# truncate output file
echo "" > $LOGFILE

# write all lines from $MSGID to "^From "
sed -n '/'"$MSGID"'/,/^From /p' $INBOX >> $LOGFILE
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Now, one could pipe the output to sed, awk, or whatever to process further (I'm looking at the automatic messages I get from NAS4FREE to process for disk issues) and take whatever action is needed.

I haven't yet checked to see if Filtaquilla spawns or execs the 'run file', so I can't yet speak for how subsequent actions might behave. It doesn't appear possible to use any sort of return from the 'run file' to affect them, though, so, for example, to send another email (a disk alert in my case) by email will probably have to be done from within the script.

[I'm using a linux system, but I think the same thing could be done on windoze using, say, cygwin.]