INTRO This version of mailagent has been written by Raphael Manfredi based on previous work from Larry Wall, published in dist-2.0. HISTORY The mailagent history is somewhat linked to the dist package history. When I discovered dist-2.0 in August 1990 and began extending metaconfig and the pat tools, I also began extending Larry Wall's mailagent, which was included in dist-2.0 along with the mailpatch command. I started adding mailhelp, maildist and maillist because I needed them, and then left France in March 1991 to go write an Eiffel compiler until March 1993. Since I was getting a lot of mail at ISE, I felt the need for a real mail filter and not just an @SH command processor. Moreover, I was getting tired of having "Command mails" showing in my mailbox. The only mail filter I knew at that time was ELM's, and it was not meeting my requirements. Therefore, I started extending mailagent late 1991 up to the point where it became a real and flexible mail filter (according to my standards anyway) and since I thought others would like to play with it too, I released it as a beta 3.0 (known as version 2.9) on comp.sources.misc in July 1992 after 7 months of hard work. I got a lot of positive feedback on this program, and therefore I continued to extend it. I also began to see some limitations in the 2.9 version and started adding new features (like perl escapes, user-defined commands, etc...). I originally intended to make version 3.0 part of dist-3.0, but mailagent was starting to get a life of its own and not really a part of dist. However, @SH commands like ``package'' are meant to be used in conjunction with metaconfig, one of dist's components. In March 1993, I left ISE and returned to France to join A.C.R.I.. Although mailagent-3.0 was virtually finished by that time, I needed to release dist-3.0 first due to some intensive user-pressure ;-). It's only late October 1993 that I found the time to finalize the manual page and add all the small features stacked in my TODO list... CREDITS My first thanks will go to Larry Wall who wrote perl in the first place. I would never have dreamed of implementing mailagent from scratch if perl had not been invented. Then I'd like to thank all the early mailagent users for their useful input, suggestions, encouragement, contributions, constructive criticism or bug reports, and especially (by alphabetical order on the first name): Akihiro Hashimoto Andrew Hardie Andy Glew Arthur Siffert Bertrand Meyer Bill Campbell Bill Wohler Bjoern Stabell Brent Chapman CJ Canon Charles A. Lind Chris Lewis Christian Bertin Christoph von Stuckrad Christopher Davis Dan O'Neill Dan Pierson Darrell Schiebel David Giddy David Vincenzetti David W. Tamkin Edward Feustel Eric M. Carroll Erland Unruh Forrest Aldrich Geoffrey Hart George Entenman George Smith George W. Wood Graham Stoney Henry Kautz J. Mark Noworolski JJ Lay James Ault Jan Polcher Jan-Piet Mens Janna Wemekamp Jean-Marc Calvez Jean-Marc Eurin Jim McCoy John Plate Jost Krieger Harald Koch Keith Pyle Keith Rose Kent Landfield Khalid Sattar Kresten Krab Thorup Larry W. Virden Mark Allman Mark Kristie Mats Lidell Matthew Simmons Michael Elkins Michael Peppler NW Thomson Nigel Metheringham Ofer Inbar Pascal Poissonnier Patrick Labbaye Paul Raines Peter J Diaz de Leon Peter N. Wan Ralf E. Stranzenbach Richard Schneider Robert Brown Scott A. McIntyre Scott Blachowicz Scott Robinson Scott Schwartz Sean Casey Shigeya Suzuki Soumendra Daas Sterling IMD Steve Hill Syd Weinstein Terry Hull Thomas Richter Thunder-Thumbs Tom Christiansen Tom Limoncelli Tom Zheng Valery Alexeev Wes Price Wolfram Schmidt Yeung Chee Wai alexeev@math.utah.edu drw@bourbaki.mit.edu jim@morse.ilo.dec.com rschneid@callisto.erc.epson.com rsmith@proteus.arc.nasa.gov s090@brems.ii.uib.no sondeen@ISI.EDU If I forgot your name, please let me know, and accept my apologies -- not necessarily in that order ;-). Deepest thanks go to: Christian Bertin Eric M. Carroll Graham Stoney Jean-Marc Eurin for their active contributions, with a special mention to Jean-Marc Eurin for carefully reviewing the release, installing it and proofreading the (long) manual page before my official posting to comp.sources.misc. I would also like to thank Manoj Srivastava , who did a wonderful job as Debian packager for mailagent. Finally, thank you Shigeya Suzuki for hosting the agent-users mailing list. Send mail to majordomo@foretune.co.jp to subscribe. Raphael Manfredi Lyon, France, December 1993 Raphael Manfredi Grenoble, France, March 2001