[Dovecot] Automating message archiving

[Jens Laas]

(05.07.01 kl.10:24) Steffen Kaiser skrev följande till dovecot at dovecot.org:

> 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.

Ive not worked with sieve but with procmail. I gather sieve is more 
powerful so whats possible with procmail should be in sieve.

With procmail simple store copies of all mails into a separate file.
A cronjob can take care of renaming this file at appropriate times.

Disadvantage is you dont archive per imap folder. You get all rolled into 
one.

>
> 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.

We sort the spam into a separate file. We rename the spam files via a cronjob.
SPAM.1 becomes SPAM.2, SPAM becomes SPAM.1, the old SPAM.2 is overwritten.

>
> 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.

That one I dont understand at all.

>
> 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?

Well if someone did a webinterface that would be nice. But everyone seems 
to have a different setup so this might not be trivial.

Whats wrong with cronjobs ?

Cheers,
Jens

>
> 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
>

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     Jens Låås                              Email: jens.laas at data.slu.se
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