[MlMt] A way to react on incoming messages?

[Bill Cole]

On 5 Jan 2021, at 17:06, Alexandre Takacs wrote:

> On 3 Jan 2021, at 14:02, Robert M. Münch wrote:
>
>> Such a plug-in could check for specific mails, and send a 
>> notification to some chat system, etc. With this, it would be 
>> possible to build-up pretty neat automation solutions which are 
>> triggered by email.
>
> I guess you can but is it really something that should be done in a 
> mail client ?
>
> Or maybe you have an use case that I don’t imagine…

Many email automation cases would be best implemented server-side, but 
not all can be or should be. One reason is simple practicality, in that 
the end user may have no access to email delivery mechanisms and no 
access post-delivery except via IMAP. Another is safety, because you may 
be using data that resides on the client machine and can't readily or 
safely be made available to a server-side process.

Example: For many years, despite running my own mail server, I did some 
automation via Eudora for handling spam. Because the decision of whether 
a specific message was spam and some aspects of my reaction required 
skilled human oversight, my automation only did the "safe" parts (e.g. 
identifying targets for reporting and blocking) that could be done 
programmatically and left me with just triggers to pull for sending 
messages and manipulating my router and mail server access controls. A 
few times per month, I had to adjust or just toss out what my scripts 
prepped for me.


-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire