This is a mail delivery agent that I developed between 2003 and 2004 because I 
didn't really like the alternatives. Since I stopped using locally delivered mail
I didn't develop it further (but it's considered stable, complete and have some users).
Somebody offered to maintain it but didn't develop it at all, so if you want to take over
it you're invited to fork the codebase.
The original description:
Animail is a POP3/APOP/IMAP4Rev1 (with or without SSL, IMAP4 from version 1.1.2
and up) client with some interesting options:
- You can activate several filters to message size, maximun number of messages
to download, or delete messages on the server based on a set of regular
expressions written in a config file if they match the message header (in this
case it will only download the header, not the entire message).
- It can be combined with other mail filters (like SpamAssassin or Bogofilter)
in a easy, elegant and documented way. This way Animail uses those programs
like 'plugins' and can extends without limits his filtering capabilities,
aplying those other filters-plugins to the mails just after they are downloaded
and just before they are delivered, giving those other filters the change to
decide if a mail is or is not spam.
- It allows downloading mail from several mail servers and those can be written
to a local mailbox with mbox format, a QMail style directory, or better, be
resent to a local SMTP like Sendmail (any SMTP is valid).
- It can forward the downloaded mail to another email adress (if we have the
SMTP option activated), or to a coma separeted list of adresses.
- We can configure the download order of the messages based on his size
(arrival order, first the bigger messages or first the smaller messages). This
allows us, for example, to get first the smaller messages so we can start
reading them while a multimegabyte message is being downloaded.
- It has a silent mode with redirects all output to the system log instead of
to the console. This is useful if we want to make script that periodically
checks for mail (2 examples of this scripts are included in the distribution).
- The program output is a lot more friendly that the one of Fetchmail and
others MDAs. When it download a message shows the message origin, and a
percentual indicator of the download of the message, over a total given in
bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, terabytes depending of the message size (tired of
huge bytesize digits? tired of dots?) [Current version supports colored output]
- It has a good speed. In a fast computer (x86 350+), working in text mode and
with the -t switch enabled it can be faster than Fetchmail. The faster is the
computer, the bigger is the difference. This only applies to local networks, on
internet they are equally slow (internet is the bottleneck).
- To quickly configure Animail after installation create a .animail directory
on your home dir, copy the file /usr/share/doc/animail/animailrc and edit to
your taste.