View Source: XMailer

One day a few years back, I wondered what mailers people were using to send me messages.  So, I wrote some perl scripts to process my incoming mail and attempt to find out.

I ran these scripts for several years on my server.  However, I've now switched to hosted web space and mail (may I recommend [fastmail.fm|http://fastmail.fm]?).  Thus, I can't run my scripts any more.

Still, I will leave the scripts up on my web site in case anyone else wants them.  The scripts do show how to use tied databases in perl, so they might make a useful learning tool.

Theory of operation: every incoming email gets fed to xmget (via procmail).  xmget processes the message and extracts the X-Mailer or User-Agent header.  That header is stored in a database via a tied perl hash.

xmdump reads the database generated by xmget and produces a pretty graph suitable for inclusion in a web page.

xmlistconv is a helper script that reads the database and produces a html page listing all the mailers.

The scripts:

;:[xmget|http://www.hollenback.net/sysadmin/xmget] - meant to be run on every incoming mail via procmail.
;:[xmdump|http://www.hollenback.net/sysadmin/xmdump] - meant to be run via cron on a regular basis.
;:[xmlistconv|http://www.hollenback.net/sysadmin/xmlistconv] - utility script to pretty-print the database info.

--phil

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View Source: XMailer

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