Welcome to
Joachim Breitner's Homepage

After having switched from Courier to Dovecot half a year ago I thought it was finally time to look into Sieve. For many years now I have maintained a procmail script to filter my incoming e-mail into  numerous subfolders. Two features are important to me: For mailing lists, folders are created automatically based on the list names, with some adjustments for certain domains, such as putting all Debian lists into a folder of their own. And my procmail script was parsing the a dump of my evolution address book to put mail from people I know in a special folder. I did not know that at the first point is actually possible in Sieve but it is, using the variables extensions. And then the second was not hard to fix either, using this small and crude bash script, which creates a Sieve script recognizing these addresses, which is called from my main Sieve script:

#!/bin/bash
(
echo 'require ["fileinto"];'
echo 'if address ["From"] ['
/usr/lib/evolution/*/evolution-addressbook-export |
 perl -n -e 'print "\"$1\",\n" if /.*:(.*@[a-z0-9.]*)\s*$/'
 echo '"Justadummy"'
echo '  ] {'
echo ' fileinto "INBOX.Bekannte"; '
echo ' }'
) > /tmp/bekannte
sieve-connect --user mail@joachim-breitner.de \
    --server 10.254.1.101 --port 2000 --notlsverify \
    --localsieve /tmp/bekannte --remotesieve bekannte  \
    --upload

I set up ManageSieve to be able to upload the scripts using sieve-connect. And finally I am able to do something that I have missed in all the years: Using the imap4flag extension, I can mark some mail automatically as read. This is useful for mail that is actually generated by me using program besides my e-mail client, such as bug reports sent by reportbug or patches submitted using darcs. I might even enable this feature for mailing list mails that I have sent.