markus’ blog

Praise sieve

March 21st, 2008

I’ve been running my own IMAP server for over 8 years now. Back when I evaluated possible options, I was fond of having all my mails remote accessible on my server and being able to do server-side filtering with sieve.

However, back then there existed no practical solution with the software I was using (Mozilla Mail, now Thunderbird), so sieve was just a word but I couldn’t use it (and I probably was lazy to do it by other means). I think I remember that Eudura had support for it.

Anyway, by sheer luck I came across the  sieve extension for Thunerbird! I couldn’t believe, but it is true and it works.

Actually, the extension not a real up to par GUI filter interface what Thunderbird offers natively, it’s a more spiced up telnet to simply access the server side filters and work on them. But that shouldn’t degrade the extension, because it’s really all you need!

I instantly converted all my Thunderbird filters to sieve and, voila, no need to depend on a client to do the mail filtering.

This gave me quite a bite when I starting using my Nokia E61i with my imap server, because there’s no filtering capability available (and if it would, it probably would be too annoying for me to sync all the filters for it), but now that problem is solved too.

In case you’re wondering what IMAP solution I’m using: it’s cyrus imap using sasl. But don’t ask me about details. I set this thing up nearly a decade ago, carried this installation through all my hardware changes, first via chroots, now with vserver, but I almost entirely forgot how I sat it up, nevermind the master password :-)

I’m thinking about upgrading the architecture, switching to DBMAIL, etc, but there’s also this voice inside: never touch a running system. And, yes, cyrus is runnig well and haven’t failed me in years.

Entry Filed under: Linux