NAME

Gaim::Log::Mailer - Have your Gaim/Pidgin logs mailed to you

SYNOPSIS

use Gaim::Log::Mailer;
my $mailer = Gaim::Log::Mailer->new();
$mailer->process();

# ~/.gaimlogmailer.yml
 logfile:  /tmp/gaimlogmailer.log
 email_to: foo@bar.com
 min_age:  3600
 throttle_interval:   3600
 throttle_max_emails: 10

DESCRIPTION

Have you ever wanted to look at the content of an IM conversation you had earlier? But you couldn't, because you had the conversation on a different system than the one you're using now? You need to centralize your Gaim/Pidgin logs.

Gaim::Log::Mailer figures out if you have new IM conversations in your Gaim log directory and mails them to your account, so you have them available in your email, which you can check, wherever you are.

This module comes with a script gaimlogmailer which just reads in a YAML configuration file (usually ~/.gaimlogmailer.yml>, then processes availabe logs up to an adjustable threshold, sends them nicely formatted to the specified email address and then exits.

It is recommended that you run this script in a cronjob, to make sure all new IM conversations are picked up and forwarded. For example, here's a cronjob that runs gaimlogmailer every hour on the 13th minute:

$ crontab -l
13 * * * * /path/to/gaimlogmailer

Configuration

The configuration file ~/.gaimlogmailer.yml specifies a number of parameters that gaimlogmailer needs to operate. They are given in YAML format, which basically just means

# comment
key: value

and comment lines are ignored. Strings need to be enclosed in quotes. For details on this format, check http://yaml.org.

Here are the parameters in detail:

email_to

(Mandatory) The email address the script sends the log to.

logfile

(Optional) The log file where the script logs all activity, using Log4perl.

logfile: "/tmp/gaimlogmailer.log"

(Note the quotes, YAML insists on them here).

min_age

(Optional, defaults to 3600). The minimum number of seconds a log file needs to stay untouched by the Gaim application before the mailer processes it. Reason for this is that there is no way to figure out if Gaim is done writing a log file or if it will still append to it at some point.

The mailer knows this and won't mail a file that has a modification date younger than min_age seconds in the past to make sure no half-written log files are processed. However, this method isn't bullet-proof, and the mailer deals with this situation: if the mailer notices that an already processed file has new data, it will process it again. This way, you'll get two emails, so make sure this happens rarely and choose min_age accordingly and wisely.

throttle_interval

(Optional, defaults to 3600/10). A new installation of gaimlogmailer might find thousands of logfiles which need to be mailed out one by one. To avoid overwhelming the mail system or triggering spam filters, the number of emails can be limited to throttle_max_emails per throttle_interval.

For example, if you want gaimlogmailer to only send a maximum of 10 emails per hour, set

throttle_interval:   3600
throttle_max_emails: 10

in your configuration file. Even if the script is rate-limited in this way, it'll pick up slowly and handle all logs eventually.

throttle_max_emails

See throttle_interval.

exclude_words

A list of blank-separated words

# configuration file
exclude_words: maybe thanks thx doesn hey put already

languages

A blank-separated list of languages the term extractor should try.

# Try English and German
languages: en de

Mail Preferences

Gaim::Log::Mailer uses Mail::DWIM to send out mail. By default, it uses a sendmail daemon on the local machine, if you want something else, you can change the local .maildwim file and specify a different transport (e.g. SMTP). See the Mail::DWIM documentation for details.

References

This module is based on an article I wrote for the German Linux Magazine, where IM logs were sent to an IMAP server: http://www.linux-magazin.de/heft_abo/ausgaben/2007/06/gespraechsprotokolle

LEGALESE

Copyright 2008 by Mike Schilli, all rights reserved. This program is free software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

AUTHOR

2008, Mike Schilli <cpan@perlmeister.com>