Quoting Alan Bates
Sure - I looked at sieve, but as i understood it, i'm bypassing any LDA stage, using getmail to deliver direct to the maildir.
i suppose i could use getmail to deliver to a holding maildir, then use an LDA to filter and deliver that mail...
Way too complicated. Or is there a reason you don't want to use Dovecot's LDA directly? I use getmail, Dovecot's LDA and Sieve in a setup very much like the one you described and it couldn't work better. Have a look at the relevant section of a typical rc-file for getmail: [destination] type = MDA_external path = /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver That's all that's needed. You especially don't need any command-line arguments when you deliver for local users. Also see my .dovecot.sieve: if anyof ( header :contains ["Subject"] ["***Spam***"], header :contains ["X-Spam-Flag"] ["YES"] ) { # I discard spam immediately discard; stop; } if header :contains ["Subject"] ["[SPAM?]"] { # File into spam when unsure fileinto "INBOX.Spam"; stop; } This way getmail hands retrieved mail to Dovecot's LDA (deliver) which looks at the Sieve rules you have defined (if any) and puts the mail in the correct location in your Maildir. Simple and elegant. This of course assumes that the LDA protocol is configured correctly in dovecot.conf and knows where to deliver the mail (basically set a correct mail_location). And you have to have support for Sieve compiled in and set up correctly, which I assume is the case for Ubuntu. Read up on LDA and Sieve on the Dovecot wiki pages for more information. Hope I didn't forget anything. I find using getmail with Dovecot enjoyably easy. I generally find using Dovecot enjoyably easy but I don't think anyone would argue that point :) HTH Andreas -- Andreas Ntaflos Vienna, Austria GPG Fingerprint: 6234 2E8E 5C81 C6CB E5EC 7E65 397C E2A8 090C A9B4