Personal e-mail and MailSpaces!

I have spent forever thinking about how great it would be to have all of my personal e-mail "read" and linked by MailSpaces - A few months ago, I installed a version of the enterprise MailSpaces on my laptop, which worked quite well (it's a bit resource intensive for my old Dell, but it did the trick)

However, not everyone wants a full enterprise product on their machine, just to play with their e-mail, so here are a few tricks for setting up your very own natural language processed, "MailSpaced", e-mail

My tinkering has been part server side, part client side. Basically, you need to be able to divert incoming e-mail to MailSpaces, and also bcc the outgoing. My trick uses procmail and Outlook, but there will be some other ways - I hope over time, I can persuade my dev team to implement something a little slicker. This really is not for the faint-hearted at this stage - I am open to improvements!

So, four steps for this one:

1. Set up a mail Space - Use the usual set-up route, but select the "Private e-mail" template - Make sure you are a member of the Space (go to the home page - If it asks you to join, then join, taking the Live e-mail option)

2. Check your own settings - Go to http://www.mailspaces.com/preferences/delivery/ where you can select how you receive e-mail. Take a look at the screenshot below.

3. Now is the time to hack into your e-mail server, and insert a procmail recipe - If you don't know what one of those is, it's probably best you don't try it, at least not until you have read up on the whole thing.

The recipe I use is:

FROM="`formail -x From:`"

CC="`formail -x Cc:`"

REPLYTO="`formail -x Reply-To:`"

:0:

* !^x-envelope-to: ...

* !^Reply-To:

| formail \

-I "To: ..." \

-I "From: $FROM<...>" \

-I "Reply-To: $FROM, $CC" \

-I "Cc:" \

| $SENDMAIL $SENDMAILFLAGS -t

:0:

* !^x-envelope-to: ...

* ^Reply-To:

| formail \

-I "To: ..." \

-I "From: $FROM<...>" \

-I "Reply-To: $REPLYTO, $CC" \

-I "Cc:" \

| $SENDMAIL $SENDMAILFLAGS -t

E-mail that has been processed by MailSpaces contains a number of X-Headers - You'll see I have used the x-envelope-to: header to ensure that only e-mail that the system has not seen before is processed - What the recipe does also is to ensure that it strips the cc: names out as well, so that when you reply to an e-mail, you get all of the cc: names there as well.

4. Bcc your outbound e-mail to MailSpaces -

If you are doing this, add the following to the beginning of the procmail recipe above:

:0:

* ^From.*<...>

* !^Reply-To:

/dev/null

to ensure that Bcc'd mail does get processed, but doesn't end up in your in-box.

I use an Outlook 2003 macro to Bcc my e-mail, to save having to remember changing the header every time:

Alt-F11 gets you the VB editor (make sure you enable macros when asked) - in "ThisOutlookSession" add the following:

Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean)
Dim objMe As Recipient
Set objMe = Item.Recipients.Add(...)
objMe.Type = olBCC
objMe.Resolve
Set objMe = Nothing
End Sub

In this current implementation, when you reply to something, you will see that it includes your Space e-mail address in the "to:" column - That is to do with the Reply To: header settings, which can only be adjusted in the enterprise version - Or if you e-mail me, I'll amend it for you.

Again, use this with care - I won't be responsible for it messing your machine up!