Hi Stephan Bosch, any update on this?
Regards,
T.B.
Am 08.05.2014 um 14:37 schrieb Stephan Bosch:
T.B. schreef op 7-5-2014 10:40:
I think it would not be a problem to develop a solution to remotely trigger re-filtering for me, myself and I. But that is not the point here. Clients like the Thunderbird Sieve Extension (https://github.com/thsmi/sieve, https://addons.mozilla.org/de/thunderbird/addon/sieve/) or the diverse webmail MUA's will only start implementing such a feature if there is a official draft or specification.
Yes, I agree.
The whole point of my initiative here is that Managesieve finally becomes the capability to replicate the features the users know from their local client side filtering (Thunderbird, Outlook) which provide the feature of re-filtering. Even big webmail providers like the Global Mail Exchange / GMX here in Germany provide re-filtering in their webgui.
I don't think this should be a ManageSieve feature. ManageSieve currently does not need/have access to the user's mailbox. It therefore also doesn't have the syntax elements and mechanisms in place to select mailboxes and ranges of messages. I think the only sensible place for this feature is IMAP.
I use the sieve-filter tool very often for myself - everytime when I create a new subfolder and create a new fileinto rule, I refilter my Inbox to clean it up and have a consistent subfolder with all old and new mails that are matching the rule.
The man page of the sieve-filter tool is 2 and a half years old ;) (http://pigeonhole.dovecot.org/doc/man1/sieve-filter.1.html) Sadly even the Wiki page doesn't mention it directly: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/HowTo/RefilterMail
I haven't received much feedback about this command line tool. So either everyone is happy with it, or it is rarely used. :)
Since the new german Dovecot book (http://www.dovecot-buch.de/) recommends the sieve-filter tool for refiltering, it will get much more attention in the future.
Only from Germans at first, although it will be translated soon I guess.
Anyway, I will give this idea a closer look somewhat soon. The main problem with IMAPSieve is not the METADATA support or the other Sieve extensions needed for it, it is the atomic nature of the IMAP commands for which it is used: either the whole command succeeds or the whole command fails. This makes things difficult for the Sieve interpreter, as it needs to keep record of what it has done for when a rollback is needed. Especially for "redirect" this is a huge pain.
However, as you rightly say, this new feature can be simpler than that. It can reduce the atomicity to include only the processing of individual messages and e.g. return a response indicating which messages were successfully processed. This way, the state at client and server can still remain consistent without too much trouble. I think I'll make a proof-of-concept first and then condense my experience into a proper specification. This can take a while though; there is much Dovecot stuff on my list at the moment.
Regards,
Stephan.