Processing Maildir contents on message-by-message basis

12 Feb 2015

      I (finally) moved over to Maildir storage here and would like to
implement some "scripts" to manage taking actions on emails manually
identified as misclassified as spam/ham. After reading through the
Dovecot 2 description of how it works to try to see how it interacts
with other processes changing the files.
I'm concerned that I would be corrupting the message indexes if I just
go hog-wild and run the scripts on the filesystem, rather than through
Dovecot in some way.
The types of actions taken would likely be:
procmail here) and/or to sa-learn

Select a message from a given mailbox (the "source")
Potentially modify it drastically (remove spamassassin markup, for
example)
Pipe the modified message to a mail-delivery agent (still running

Assuming successful completion of the pipe action(s), remove the
source message from the mailbox

While I can use doveadm to do bulk move/delete actions, I don't see a
clear way to iterate through a set of messages and perform actions on them.
First off, if I wrangle and mangle the message files directly, do I have
to worry about the indexes, or do the indexes "magically" repair
themselves in cases where the messages are either altered (including
headers) or removed?
Have I missed a way to iterate over messages and process it using
external tools using the dovecot tools?
Has this been discussed ad nauseum and I somehow missed it? (If so, for
which I apologize profusely).
Thanks,
Jeff

Jeff Kletsky

Steffen Kaiser

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