Small suggestion for improvement of pigeonhole/imapsieve documentation
Matthias Petermann
mp at petermann-it.de
Sat Feb 25 07:19:23 UTC 2023
Hello all,
this is my first post on this list and I would like to introduce myself
briefly. My name is Matthias and I am from Saxony in Germany. I'm
working with Unix and mail systems for a long time - actually with focus
for NetBSD and Cyrus IMAP. Occasionally I also use Dovecot, which has
several reasons. Today, one of the reasons was that I would like to
trigger Sieve scripts when moving mail within mailbox folders - i.e. at
an unspecified time after the actual mail arrival. In doing so, I came
across the imapsieve extension for Pigeonhole fairly quickly and decided
that the administrative Sieve scripts in imapsieve were exactly what I
needed. However, despite having debug logging fully up, I couldn't
figure out until just now why my sieve script wasn't running despite
having IMAP events logged. Even intentionally defining an invalid script
did not result in an error, so it seemed to be ignored altogether. Until
I just now came across that I seem to have misunderstood the documentation.
The template shown for the imapsieve_mailboxXXX_ parameters suggested to
me that a sequence number of three digits must / can be specified here.
Thus, I started numbering my parameters with imapsieve_mailbox001.
However, while researching in various forums, I came across only
examples that use imapsieve_mailbox1_ as the first parameter. In
desperation I tried this out - now it works for me, too.
Long story short - I don't know if I'm the only one who has made this
mistake so far. A little hint in the documentation[1] would have helped
me, how the XXX is meant exactly. I am referring to this section:
```
This setting configures the name of a mailbox for which administrator
scripts are configured. The `XXX’ in this setting is a sequence number,
which allows configuring multiple associations between Sieve scripts and
mailboxes. The settings defined hereafter with matching sequence numbers
apply to the mailbox named by this setting. The sequence of configured
mailboxes ends at the first missing imapsieve_mailboxXXX_name setting.
This setting supports wildcards with a syntax compatible with the IMAP
LIST command, meaning that this setting can apply to multiple or even
all (“*”) mailboxes.
```
What do you think about adding a small explanatory sentence to the
documentation? For example:
```
This setting configures the name of a mailbox for which administrator
scripts are configured. The `XXX’ in this setting is a sequence number,
which allows configuring multiple associations between Sieve scripts and
mailboxes.
The sequence number must begin with the digit 1 without preceding zeros
and may have a maximum of three digits.
The settings defined hereafter with matching sequence numbers apply to
the mailbox named by this setting. The sequence of configured mailboxes
ends at the first missing imapsieve_mailboxXXX_name setting. This
setting supports wildcards with a syntax compatible with the IMAP LIST
command, meaning that this setting can apply to multiple or even all
(“*”) mailboxes.
```
Many greetings
Matthias
[1] https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/sieve/plugins/imapsieve/
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