[Dovecot] Allowing clients to test their Sieve scripts

[Frerich Raabe]

On Jun 14, 2013, at 9:50 AM, Thomas Harold <thomas-lists at nybeta.com> wrote:

> On 6/14/2013 12:40 PM, Frerich Raabe wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> One thing which came up repeatedly is that clients using the IMAP server I run (using Dovecot 2.1) wonder whether they broke their Sieve scripts, i.e. it often goes like "I don't know whether I just didn't receive any mail, or whether my filters broke. Can you check the logs?".
>> 
>> I then usually just run the sieve-test binary (part of the Pigeonhole distribution) and send them the output. However, I was wondering - is there maybe a way for them to try it themselves? Like, maybe a tiny web server which just prints a form asking for a mail file and a sieve script, and then it runs sieve-script and prints the output of that? I wonder how other people do that.
>> 
> 
> If you have Thunderbird, you may want to have them try out the Sieve plug-in available at http://sieve.mozdev.org/
> 
> It auto-compiles and displays errors in the edit window.
> 
> The other thing we do is use RoundCube webmail (which has a sieve plugin) and have our users edit their sieve scripts through that instead.  It's a form-based rules editor, so a bit harder for them to goof it up.

Thanks for your response (and the others who responded to this thread!). I also have RoundCube setup and indeed many people use that, since you can even switch to an 'Advanced Mode' in the editor in which you just get the raw Sieve script to edit in a text editor.

However, I wasn't primarily thinking of syntax errors but rather logic errors in the script, like "Why did this mail get discarded?" or "Why did this mail end up in folder XYZ?". sieve-test can at least print a nice description (and I seem to recall you could even get some verbose output from it so that you could see all the decisions it took).

-- 
Frerich Raabe - raabe at froglogic.com
www.froglogic.com - Multi-Platform GUI Testing