About batemail

bate [def]: to take away, subtract.

batemail is a Perl script that you slip between your MTA (e.g. Sendmail) and your local mailer (e.g. Procmail) to remove potentially nasty attachments from email messages. Basically, it takes input on STDIN, searches for (and possibly removes) MIME attachments with a given filename extension, and pipes the output to the local mailer. Specifically, what distinguishes a taboo attachment from an acceptable one is that the filename ends with one of several "blacklisted" extensions (e.g. EXE, VBS, etc.).

The concept is simple enough and after searching the 'net for a while, I did turn up some discussion on the idea, but nothing that I really liked. Also, since I suffer from a debilitating case of NCH (Not Coded Here) disorder, I decided to write my own.

Oh, and since I'm a free software advocate, I am releasing this under the GPL. So use it, improve it, and share it!

News

Since the initial announcement release on Freshmeat, I signed up for project hosting on SourceForge. As of now, the web site for batemail will be located there.

As I'm not particularly interested in keeping two sites up to date, I'm going to use this page mainly as a springboard to the SourceForge site. Once you get the hang of SourceForge's layout, it really is a slick setup. You can get to the batemail project's main page here; or for a quick start, here are some shortcuts to the good stuff:



Downloads - The latest file releases.
News - batemail related news.
Forums - Discuss batemail with other users and the developer.
Tracker - Submit bugs, patches, support requests, etc.

Thank you and good luck!

Ryan VanMiddlesworth
ryanvm@insightbb.com