So I use my trusty iBook to receive all my email. My iBook, however, is showing its age, as it no longer has the speed to keep up with the demanding tasks that I wish to complete. To work, MailStat uses an AppleScript to insert a record in the MySQL database that is running on the iBook. This occurs as a rule action. Another action fires off if spam is detected to switch the @type@ field in the SQL record to “spam” from “mail,” thus keeping track of mail versus spam. Then, a cron script fires that gets a summary of mail for the last 30 days and FTP(File Transfer Protocol)s that information to my web server where you see “interpreted statistics”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/mailstat/. For reasons of lack of computing power (I think), Mail fails to run the second rule for spam. (My excuse for the lack of CPU power seems like a cop out, but this might be Mail’s fault or even—God forbid—an error in my code. I need to include some debugging code to figure out where exactly the problem lies.) Thus, on some days, my mail versus spam ratio rises considerably when compared to previous days despite no real increase in spam. To fix the discrepancies, I manually alter the SQL records on the iBook using “phpMyAdmin”:http://www.phpmyadmin.net/.

I’ll have to consider my options in how to fix this minor, but inconvenient, problem.