Dougal is a mail-washing program for the POP3 mail protocol. It connects to the server and performs regular-expression matches against specified headers; if a match is found, the message is deleted. It is designed to be run before a user checks his or her mail. Because only the headers are downloaded, Dougal is faster than methods that download all mail and then filter it on the client machine.
Dougal is Free software, licensed under the LGPL. If you find Dougal useful, please consider donating some money towards its further development. If you wish to contact me, please visit my personal homepage. The Dougal project page, where you can view news, submit bugs, and seek support is here.
To run Dougal, you need an installation of Perl 5 (or later), with IO::Socket (note that most Perl installations include IO::Socket). Dougal has been tested on Mandrake Linux 9.0. You will also need to know what POP headers are, and how to use regular expressions. If you don't, you might want to try a more beginner-friendly mail washer.
Once you have downloaded and extracted the archive, edit the file dougal.conf
and add at least one POP host, and some rules. Then run dougal.pl, and it'll apply the rules
to each POP host in turn. To see exactly what it's doing, run it with the --verbose
flag.
As it is written in Perl, Dougal is distributed in a single archive, suitable for all supported platforms. You can download the latest archive from Sourceforge.
If you like Dougal, and it saves you time and / or money, please consider donating to its further development. There are a number of features on the horizon, including Perl eval support (i.e. embedded Perl code in the filtering rules), and donations allow me to spend more time on Dougal instead of other more profitable projects.