On 2025-07-20 02:44, Paul Zirnik via dovecot wrote:

Yes, but you can have more than one active sieve script. The USER.sieve is some kind of distributor that activates all your active scripts

Hmm, this is a rather complicated topic. Especially when there are global, default, before and/or after and personal scripts involved. e.g. the sieve command "keep" changes its behavior depending on in which script it is located. Then one has to look into precedence and order.

But when it comes to personal scripts, there can only be one active one.

$ cat .sieve/USER.sieve

USER Management Script

This script includes the various active sieve scripts

it is AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED. DO NOT EDIT MANUALLY!

For more information, seehttp://wiki.kolab.org/KEP:14#USER

require ["include"];

include :personal "mysieve";

But if i review the header, it looks like it probably is related to KDE (kmail or sieveeditor) which i use. Maybe this is a KDE only thing ? I never digged into this, as it just works since ages 🙂

This seems to be an interesting workaround for allowing multiple personal scripts.

But still, only the "distributor" file is active. So technically it is only one script that is active. Having multiple scripts can be hard to deal with, because you still need to write the rules depending on which script you are editing, since the rules are applied top to bottom. This can easily become a nightmare, but it's anyone's choice really.

However, this explains the USER file that includes your activated script. As you already mentioned, this is most likely the doing of your sieve client. But now at least it makes sense.

Thanks for clarifying this.

I am no longer nervous. ;-)

Cheers, K. C.

-- regards Helmut K. C. Tessarek KeyID 0x172380A011EF4944 Key fingerprint = 8A55 70C1 BD85 D34E ADBC 386C 1723 80A0 11EF 4944

/* Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer for chaos and madness await thee at its end. */