by Like most sysadmins, I make heavy use of email. I actually run
a Cyrus IMAP server on my desktop and use fetchmail
to grab mail from the company server, filter it through procmail
for things like analyzing cron job output and emailed logs, and then
hand it to Cyrus’s deliver program, which processes it through
filters built using the “sieve” language. Cyrus also has a dandy
indexer, so that it’s easy to search through a considerable
amount of email. And doing email filtering and indexing server-side
upon delivery means that the filters don’t depend on my mail client,
so webmail, local X GUI mail, and pine or mutt all show the same filtered results,
and I avoid the pain of migrating filters when I change mailers.
There are RFCs about sieve and some extensions to it, and a couple
of front-ends. I use squirrelmail when I need webmail because
I like it, and it has a sieve-editing plugin, too. I used this
plugin to edit filters for a long time, but more recently I have started
maintaining my filters using the sieve language itself.
My sieve filters live in ~/lib/sieve and are maintained in CVS.
Here’s roughly what they look like:
: ~/lib/sieve; ls
CVS work
: ~/lib/sieve; cat work
require ["fileinto","reject","vacation","imapflags","relational","comparator-i;ascii-numeric","regex","notify"];
if header :contains "Received" "compilerlist@example.com"
{
fileinto "mlists.compiler";
stop;
}
if header :regex :comparator "i;ascii-casemap" "Subject" "^Release notice:"
{
fileinto "releases";
stop;
}
if allof (header :regex :comparator "i;ascii-casemap" "Subject" "^Output file listing from [a-z]*backup$",
header :regex :comparator "i;ascii-casemap" "From" "^BackupUser")
{
fileinto "Backup listings";
stop;
}
if header :is "Subject" "Daily virus scan reminder"
{
discard;
stop;
}
Here’s how I upload them, after editing a text file like the above:
: ~/lib/sieve; sieveshell localhost (my firewall rules do not permit off-localhost connections to sieve's port 2000) connecting to localhost Please enter your password: > put work > list work <- active script phpscript > quit
(phpscript is left over from using squirrelmail’s “avelsieve” plugin).
One very nice thing about all this is that all the parts are
available in recent Fedora releases. To be sure, there is some
configuring to activate Cyrus and squirrelmail and the indexer
(set up squatter in /etc/cyrus.conf) and to make the
fetchmail-to-procmail-to-Cyrus handoffs work.
Yes, it’s backed up.