[Dovecot] Sieve user info log (was: problems with sieve under 2.0)

[Stephan Bosch]

Hi Perry,

Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> By the way, I've noticed that there doesn't seem to be a good way for
> the user to get information on what email message gets filed where by
> sieve -- syslog information seems to be the sole data source
> available.
> 

Right. There is a per-user <main-script>.log file (e.g. 
.dovecot.sieve.log), but that will only be written when there are any 
errors. Info logging is indeed only available in the syslogs.

> procmail has a facility where you can ask it to log every action it
> takes. I looked around for a similar facility for sieve and I didn't
> seem to see it. Did I miss something, or is it absent?
> 

I DO see the merit of this. However, configuring this behavior is an 
interesting issue. If the user log verbosity is configured in the 
Dovecot userdb, it may in many cases still only be configurable by the 
administrator.

An alternative solution would be to provide the logging configuration 
directly in the Sieve script; analogous to the way Procmail handles 
this. This would give users direct control. However, the Sieve 
specification and its extensions currently define no such facility.

In fact, both Sieve and ManageSieve don't provide any means for the user 
to control what is logged during script execution. This would require 
some new or custom (vnd.dovecot.) Sieve or ManageSieve extension. 
However, defining a new extension like that is rarely useful unless 
clients implement support for it.

Another problem is that users need filesystem access or some other 
custom (HTTP) interface to read the logs. This can be problematic when 
virtual users are involved. This too could be mended with an extension 
to the ManageSieve protocol. Alternatively, the Pigeonhole TODO list 
mentions a solution that writes logs as messages in a special 
IMAP-accessible folder, but I'm still not sure how practical that is.

The above considerations may warrant starting a draft RFC on controlling 
and accessing Sieve runtime logs.

But, I'm deviating from the original issue... what is it that you truly 
need right now? And for the Dovecot list, any other ideas on the above?

Regards,

Stephan.