[Dovecot] Automating message archiving

[Steffen Kaiser]

Hallo,

I recently stumple over some discussion about Sieve and what's the 
advantage to integrate it into the server rather than the LDA.

Most of the filtering capabilites local users want to have performed are 
related to the INBOX or more preciesly the way to filter the message 
coming in.

However, there are few tasks left:

1) Auto-archive old mail.
2) Drop old mail.
3) "Seen" mails are moved from INBOX to somewhere else.

To 1) Several people love to store each single mail, but because the 
system becomes very slow when they open a mailbox with, day, 5000 messages 
(Mozilla even core dumps sometimes); they archive the mails by year or 
month, if they got elder than, say, 6 month.
I do not want to discuss this habbit, it's like it is and I have the 
trouble with it.

To 2) There is the doing of dropping all messages flagged as SPAM into a 
specific folder. It would be nice if the does messages are deleted, when 
they grew get elder.

To 3) I don't grasp the idea, but it seems that notebook users want to 
look, what messages are new, flag and download selected ones; when they 
connect next time the "old, already seen" ones should be invisible, but 
still accessable on demand in another folder. Maybe it has to do with that 
the client sometimes reads the whole IMAP INBOX again, instead just the 
new ones. I've seen this behaviour with Mozilla myself in conjunction with 
a variaty of IMAP servers now and then.

Those things must be user-configurable, of course ;-), I hoped Sieve would 
solve this problems, but it doesn't. The MVMF mentioned in the mailing 
list, doesn't as well.

Does somebody has some solution for these tasks, besides to setup a 
cronjob and hack a webinterface?

Is there some Dovecot tool that one can use to manipulate the mail 
storage? UW-IMAP ships such thing (mailutil), but it does not support 
Maildir and it would be nice, when the Dovecot extensions are created 
well.

Bye,

-- 
Steffen Kaiser