Mailfilter README.Slackware


0. GENERAL INFORMATION 

Mailfilter is a flexible utility for UNIX (-like) operating systems to get rid
of unwanted spam mails, before having to go through the trouble of downloading
them into the local computer. It offers support for one or many POP3 accounts
and is especially useful for dialup connections via modem, ISDN, etc. 

Mailfilter connects to any POP3 mail box and compares part of its content to a
set of user defined filter rules. That way the spam gets deleted directly on
the mail server. 

With Mailfilter you can define your own filters (rules) to determine which
e-mails should be delivered and which are considered waste. Rules are regular
expressions, so you can make use of familiar options from other mail delivery
programs such as e.g. procmail. 

Mailfilter is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. For
more information, see the COPYING file provided with the Mailfilter program.

The latest version of Mailfilter can be obtained from this web page:

       http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/


2. HOW TO COMPILE MAILFILTER ON SLACKWARE 

Several people have reported problems when trying to install Mailfilter on the
Slackware Linux distribution, in particular version 3.9 was affected. The
reason for this seems to be in the standard include files for Slackware's
C-compiler, not in the source code of Mailfilter. (Input was also given that
this is what happens with all distributions using old glibc or libc versions.)

If you are trying to compile Mailfilter and get an error message similar to
the following on your screen:

  /usr/include/regex.h:1,
  from PopAccount, cc:35:
  /usr/include/rx.h:414:
  Semicolon missing after struct declaration

then try editing the affected file manually as follows. (Don't worry, it's not
that hard!). Line 414 in /usr/include/rx.h contains:

  } pair;

Modify this line to:

  };
  pair;

Now your source code should compile beautifully! But please report problems if
you face other difficulties or oddities trying to run Mailfilter on Slackware.
Your feedback is very much appreciated!


3. CREDITS 

Thanks to Pat Parrinello and Mel Sojka for pointing out the problems and their
help in solving this issue.