[Dovecot] Pigeonhole sieve re-filter extension?

Stephan Bosch stephan at rename-it.nl
Mon Sep 21 22:25:32 UTC 2015


Op 9/21/2015 om 12:16 AM schreef T.B.:
> Hi Stephan Bosch,
> any update on this?

Unfortunately, no.

It is not high up my list at the moment. :/

Regards,

Stephan.

>
>
> 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.



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