Table of Contents

Using POPFile on Mac OS X Platforms

POPFile v1.1.0 comes with the first official Mac OS X installer! You can now install POPFile on your Mac easily. POPFile v1.1.1 is now compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

System Requirements

You'll need several things to get started with POPFile on Mac OS X.

Installation

  1. Download the Mac OS X installer from the POPFile Download Page.
  2. Run POPFile-x.x.x.pkg and follow the installation instructions.
  3. POPFile will be installed in /Library/POPFile/ and it will be automatically launched in background.
    Important note: Nothing will appear on your screen! To check if it's running correctly, read the “Accessing POPFile” section below.
  4. Configure buckets. See Bucket Setup.
    Important note: The Mac OS X installer does not create any bucket on your installation unlike the Windows installer. You need to create at least two buckets before using it.
  5. Configure your email client. See Configuring Specific Mail Clients.

Accessing POPFile

Utility scripts included in the installer package

The installer package includes several utility scripts written in AppleScript. You can copy them to your hard drive.

Uninstalling

  1. Run the 'uninstall-popfile' script mentioned above.
    Note: The uninstaller will remove not only POPFile program but also the corpus and configuration files. If you want to use them later, please backup them before uninstalling.

Installing POPfile MANUALLY on Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger) or later

This procedure shows you how to install POPfile on Mac OS X 10.4.x systems, and how to create a startup item that will start POPfile each time you reboot the system.

As of Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X comes with Perl and SQLite3 installed. So you'll simply need to install Xcode, a few Perl library packages, and a startup item.

At the time of this writing (January 2007), POPfile does not fully support SQLite3. On Mac OS X 10.4.x systems, POPfile requires the SQLite2 Perl package, DBD::SQLite2. So to run POPfile in Mac OS X 10.4.x, you'll need to install:

Note: Because setting up CPAN, a Perl package manager, or Fink, another package manager, on a virgin system can complicate matters, we'll stick with the source and do it the old-school way to avoid complications.

Note: To edit scripts or configuration files, use a plain text editor (like the command-line editor,vi, or the GUI editor TextWrangler). Make sure the text file content is plain text.

TIP: On the command line, ~ means “your home directory”. So ~/Desktop/packages means /Users/yourusername/Desktop/packages.

Note: An alternative set of instructions is available here by Michael Artz.

Step By Step Instructions

NOTE: You should be logged into an administrator account for this procedure.

Installing the system requirements

  1. Install Xcode from the CD/DVD that came with your Mac. You may also download it from here: Apple Xcode Web Page
  2. Download the cross-platform version of POPFile from here: Cross-Platform POPfile
  3. Download these Perl library packages (from the CPAN Web Site) and place them all into a folder on your desktop named “packages”:
  4. Install each of the Perl library packages you downloaded in the previous step:
    1. Open a terminal window if one is not already open.
    2. Enter the command to change the working directory to the “packages” folder on your desktop: 
      cd ~/Desktop/packages
    3. Enter the command to expand the package (where name is the name of the package): 
      tar xzvf name.tar.gz
    4. Enter the command to change the working directory to the expanded package folder (where name is the name of the expanded package folder): 
      cd name
    5. Enter the command to build the GCC make file from the Perl make file: 
      perl MakeFile.PL
    6. Enter the command to compile the project: 
      make


      Note: If you compile any of these packages and it outputs an error starting out with something like: Can't locate DBD/SQLite2.pm in @INC, that means that package depends on other Perl library packages. The dependency package name is right after the word “locate” (in this example, it is DBD::SQLite2).

    7. Enter the command to install the library package into your system: 
      sudo make install

Installing POPFile

  1. Enter the command to create a folder to hold POPfile (we suggest ~/Library/POPfile): 
    mkdir ~/Library/POPfile


    Note: While this folder can reside anywhere, we suggest you create it somewhere in your home directory so that if you back up your home directory, POPfile gets backed up as well. We assume you have used the location ~/Library/POPfile for the rest of this procedure.

  2. Copy or move the POPfile ZIP archive into ~/Library/POPfile folder you just created.
  3. Expand the POPfile ZIP archive archive in the ~/Library/POPfile folder. You should now have a bunch of files in ~/Library/POPfile - one of which is popfile.pl.
    Note: If the POPfile ZIP archive expands into a sub-folder in ~/Library/POPfile, move all items into ~/Library/POPfile and get rid of the sub-folder.

Test your POPfile installation

  1. Open a terminal window if one is not already open.
  2. Enter the command to change the working directory to the ~/Library/POPfile folder: 
    cd ~/Library/POPfile
  3. Enter the command to start POPfile manually: 
    sudo perl popfile.pl
  4. Watch the output in the terminal. If POPfile is installed properly, you should not see any errors.
    Note: If you start POPfile and it outputs an error starting out with something like: Can't locate DBD/SQLite2.pm in @INC, that means you still need to install one or more Perl library packages. The package name is right after the word “locate” (in this example, the Perl library package you need to install is DBD::SQLite2).
    Note 2: If you see following error, 
    Couldn't start the pop3 proxy because POPFile could not bind to the
listen port 110. This could be because there is another service
using that port or because you do not have the right privileges on
your system (On Unix systems this can happen if you are not root
and the port you specified is less than 1024).

    you may need to run POPFile as root (use sudo) or change the POP3 and the UI port greater than 1024. To change the port settings, use following command (this command will change the POP3 port to 1110 and the UI port to 9090): 

    perl popfile.pl --set pop3_port=1110 --set html_port=9090

    For more information about the command-line options, see POPFile Command Line and Advanced Options

  1. Type Control-C into the terminal window to stop POPfile and exit to the command prompt.

At this point POPfile is installed properly, but will not start up automatically every time you reboot.

Creating a POPfile Startup Item for Mac OS X

NOTE: You should be logged into an administrator account for this procedure.

  1. Create the Mac OS X POPfile startup item:
  2. Enter this command to create the folder /Library/StartupItems/POPfile: 
    sudo mkdir -p /Library/StartupItems/POPfile
  3. Create a plain text file named "StartupParameters.plist" in the /Library/StartupItems/POPfile folder with this content: 
    {
	Description		= "POPfile mail classification proxy";
	Provides		= ("popfile");
	Requires		= ("Network");
	Uses			= ("Disks", "Network Time", "IPServices");
	OrderPreference  	= "Last";
	Messages =
	{
		start = "Starting POPfile";
		stop  = "Stopping POPfile";
	};
}
  4. Create a plain text file named “POPfile” in the /Library/StartupItems/POPfile/ folder with this content: 
    #!/bin/sh
#
# POPfile - startup script
#
# For this to work POPfile should be in /Library/POPfile
#
. /etc/rc.common
 
PFPATH='/Users/yourusername/Library/POPfile'
 
if [ "$1" == "start" ]
then
	pid=$( ps -axww | grep popfile.pl | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $1 }' )
	if ! [ $pid ]; then
		ConsoleMessage "Starting POPfile mail classification proxy"
		cd "$PFPATH"
		perl popfile.pl > /dev/null 2>&1 &
 
	fi
 
elif [ "$1" == "stop" ]
then
	pid=$( ps -axww | grep popfile.pl | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $1 }' )
	if [ $pid ]; then  
		ConsoleMessage "Stopping POPfile mail classification proxy"		
		kill -6 $pid
	fi
 
elif [ "$1" == "restart" ]
then
	pid=$( ps -axww | grep popfile.pl | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $1 }' )
	ConsoleMessage "Restarting POPfile mail classification proxy"
	kill -6 $pid
	cd "$PFPATH"
	perl popfile.pl > /dev/null 2>&1 &
fi
  5. Create a plain text file named “Localizable.strings” in the /Library/StartupItems/POPfile/Resources/English.lproj/ folder with this content: 
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist SYSTEM " file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/PropertyList.dtd" ; ;>
<plist version="0.9">
<dict>
<key>Starting POPfile</key>
<string>Starting POPfile </string>
<key>Stopping POPfile </key>
<string>Stopping POPfile </string>
</dict>
</plist>
  6. You should now have this hierarchy of folders and files: 
    /Library/ 
  StartupItems/ 
    POPfile/ 
      POPfile 
      StartupParameters.plist 
      Resources/ 
        English.lproj/ 
        Localizable.strings
  7. In a terminal window, enter these commands: 
    cd /Library/StartupItems
sudo chown -R root.admin popfile
cd popfile
sudo chmod 754 popfile
sudo chmod 644 StartupParameters.plist
  8. Finally, to start up POPFile without rebooting enter this terminal command: 
    sudo /Library/StartupItems/POPfile/POPfile start

TODO: Add details about the relationship between POPfile, DBD::SQlite2, and the SQLite3 command-line tool included with Mac OS X 10.4.x.

TODO: Add instructions to edit the popfile.cfg file and change the bayes_dbconnect property to dbi:SQLite2:dbname=$dbname to speed up POPfile launch times.

RevisedStartupItem