[Dovecot] Pigeonhole sieve re-filter extension?

[T.B.]

Hi Stephan Bosch,
any update on this?

Regards,

T.B.


Am 08.05.2014 um 14:37 schrieb Stephan Bosch:
> T.B. schreef op 7-5-2014 10:40:
>> I think it would not be a problem to develop a solution to remotely
>> trigger re-filtering for me, myself and I. But that is not the point
>> here. Clients like the Thunderbird Sieve Extension
>> (https://github.com/thsmi/sieve,
>> https://addons.mozilla.org/de/thunderbird/addon/sieve/) or the diverse
>> webmail MUA's will only start implementing such a feature if there is
>> a official draft or specification.
>
> Yes, I agree.
>
>> The whole point of my initiative here is that Managesieve finally
>> becomes the capability to replicate the features the users know from
>> their local client side filtering (Thunderbird, Outlook) which provide
>> the feature of re-filtering. Even big webmail providers like the
>> Global Mail Exchange / GMX here in Germany provide re-filtering in
>> their webgui.
>
> I don't think this should be a ManageSieve feature. ManageSieve
> currently does not need/have access to the user's mailbox. It therefore
> also doesn't have the syntax elements and mechanisms in place to select
> mailboxes and ranges of messages. I think the only sensible place for
> this feature is IMAP.
>
>> I use the sieve-filter tool very often for myself - everytime when I
>> create a new subfolder and create a new fileinto rule, I refilter my
>> Inbox to clean it up and have a consistent subfolder with all old and
>> new mails that are matching the rule.
>>
>> The man page of the sieve-filter tool is 2 and a half years old ;)
>> (http://pigeonhole.dovecot.org/doc/man1/sieve-filter.1.html)
>> Sadly even the Wiki page doesn't mention it directly:
>> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/HowTo/RefilterMail
>
> I haven't received much feedback about this command line tool. So either
> everyone is happy with it, or it is rarely used. :)
>
>> Since the new german Dovecot book (http://www.dovecot-buch.de/)
>> recommends the sieve-filter tool for refiltering, it will get much
>> more attention in the future.
>
> Only from Germans at first, although it will be translated soon I guess.
>
> Anyway, I will give this idea a closer look somewhat soon. The main
> problem with IMAPSieve is not the METADATA support or the other Sieve
> extensions needed for it, it is the atomic nature of the IMAP commands
> for which it is used: either the whole command succeeds or the whole
> command fails. This makes things difficult for the Sieve interpreter, as
> it needs to keep record of what it has done for when a rollback is
> needed. Especially for "redirect" this is a huge pain.
>
> However, as you rightly say, this new feature can be simpler than that.
> It can reduce the atomicity to include only the processing of individual
> messages and e.g. return a response indicating which messages were
> successfully processed. This way, the state at client and server can
> still remain consistent without too much trouble. I think I'll make a
> proof-of-concept first and then condense my experience into a proper
> specification. This can take a while though; there is much Dovecot stuff
> on my list at the moment.
>
> Regards,
>
> Stephan.