Andy Dills
2008-03-07 01:59:00 UTC
After solving a problem with a sweet little application I discovered (more
on that below), I wanted to get some feedback about a potential
enhancement for IMAP: standardized, MUA independant, server-side sorting.
Currently, there are two basic solutions for sorting: handle it during
delivery or handle it in the MUA. However, if you handle it in the MUA,
you lose some of the client independancy and portability that imap was
designed to address, as there is no mechanism to sync sorting rules
between clients, and many lightweight clients don't support sorting at
all. On the flip side, in distributed mail envrionments sorting at
delivery time isn't feasible, as you typically have the entire mailspool
owned by a single UID and mounted via NFS. My basic point is that the two
paradigms for sorting have fundemental flaws that severaly limit them.
It occured to me that it would be ideal to enable sorting in the imap
daemon, enabling users to implement sorting rules which are stored in
their directory (similar to the other imap metadata), and which get
invoked whenever mail is checked. Perhaps that is beyond the reasonable
scope of the imap protocol, but in my mind sorting is a critical task that
is poorly addressed and needs to be standardized. I'd love to hear
opinions on this.
See, in our mail cluster environment, it's basically impossible to use
procmail without forwarding your mail to our shell server (nor are we able
to use the dovecot LDA). So, the question presented to me by one of my
business partners was, since Outlook was shortsighted and didn't include
the ability to sync sorting rules between clients, nor did they implement
sorting functionality whatsoever on the windows mobile version, what
options does he have to ensure proper sorting of his mail without having
to leave outlook running 24x7? He doesn't want to have to wade through
mailing list email on his mobile outlook, nor does he want to have to
ensure his filter rules are consistent in both his outlook and our
webmail.
So, I poked around in the ports tree, and found a gem: imapfilter.
http://imapfilter.hellug.gr/
It's configured via lua, supports a very rich array of actions and
queries, and has proven to be very robust and lightweight. I helped him
get started with some sample rules, added it to run every minute as a cron
job, and boom: robust, fully featured, MUA independant filtering in an
environment that can't support procmail or the dovecot LDA.
As nice as it is, it's still a personal solution. In my mind we need to
have standardized, server-side, MUA-independant sorting rules that get
invoked when a mailbox is checked. Thoughts?
Andy
---
Andy Dills
Xecunet, Inc.
www.xecu.net
301-682-9972
---
on that below), I wanted to get some feedback about a potential
enhancement for IMAP: standardized, MUA independant, server-side sorting.
Currently, there are two basic solutions for sorting: handle it during
delivery or handle it in the MUA. However, if you handle it in the MUA,
you lose some of the client independancy and portability that imap was
designed to address, as there is no mechanism to sync sorting rules
between clients, and many lightweight clients don't support sorting at
all. On the flip side, in distributed mail envrionments sorting at
delivery time isn't feasible, as you typically have the entire mailspool
owned by a single UID and mounted via NFS. My basic point is that the two
paradigms for sorting have fundemental flaws that severaly limit them.
It occured to me that it would be ideal to enable sorting in the imap
daemon, enabling users to implement sorting rules which are stored in
their directory (similar to the other imap metadata), and which get
invoked whenever mail is checked. Perhaps that is beyond the reasonable
scope of the imap protocol, but in my mind sorting is a critical task that
is poorly addressed and needs to be standardized. I'd love to hear
opinions on this.
See, in our mail cluster environment, it's basically impossible to use
procmail without forwarding your mail to our shell server (nor are we able
to use the dovecot LDA). So, the question presented to me by one of my
business partners was, since Outlook was shortsighted and didn't include
the ability to sync sorting rules between clients, nor did they implement
sorting functionality whatsoever on the windows mobile version, what
options does he have to ensure proper sorting of his mail without having
to leave outlook running 24x7? He doesn't want to have to wade through
mailing list email on his mobile outlook, nor does he want to have to
ensure his filter rules are consistent in both his outlook and our
webmail.
So, I poked around in the ports tree, and found a gem: imapfilter.
http://imapfilter.hellug.gr/
It's configured via lua, supports a very rich array of actions and
queries, and has proven to be very robust and lightweight. I helped him
get started with some sample rules, added it to run every minute as a cron
job, and boom: robust, fully featured, MUA independant filtering in an
environment that can't support procmail or the dovecot LDA.
As nice as it is, it's still a personal solution. In my mind we need to
have standardized, server-side, MUA-independant sorting rules that get
invoked when a mailbox is checked. Thoughts?
Andy
---
Andy Dills
Xecunet, Inc.
www.xecu.net
301-682-9972
---