Mail Filtering with Sieve at UP

From TLUGWiki

1 Introduction
2 Sieve support on campus mailservers
3 Sieve clients
4 UP Web-based sieve interface (SmartSieve)

[edit] Introduction

Sieve is a mail filtering language. It allows users to upload scripts to their mailserver, where the rules contained in the script are used to implement filtering similar to that supported by good mail clients. The advantage of using sieve is that it's independant of your client setup (something that is particularly useful if you read your mail from multiple machines).

See http://www.cyrusoft.com/sieve/ for more info on sieve.

[edit] Sieve support on campus mailservers

[edit] Warning

Apparently this service is in a testing phase, so use this infromation at your own risk and do not blame me if it gets you in trouble with IT.

[edit] Postino/MX1 (UP personnel mail)

mx1.up.ac.za supports sieve, here is a telnet session connected to the sieve (managesieve) port:

simeon@io:~$ telnet mx1.up.ac.za sieve
Trying 137.215.6.15...
Connected to mx1.up.ac.za.
Escape character is '^]'.
"IMPLEMENTATION" "Cyrus timsieved v2.1.15-IPv6-Debian-2.1.15-0woody.1.0"
"SASL" "LOGIN PLAIN"
"SIEVE" "fileinto reject envelope vacation imapflags notify subaddress relational regex"
"STARTTLS"
OK
^]
telnet> cl
Connection closed.
simeon@io:~$

[edit] Student (UP student mail)

student.up.ac.za does not listen on port 2000, which seems to indicate that IT has not enabled sieve. I don't know if they plan to support it either (it might be that sieve would cause too much load), so ask them directly if you're interested.

[edit] Sieve clients

In order for users to upload/download, enable/disable, delete/create sieve scripts, a protocol, managesieve was defined.

See http://www.cyrusoft.com/sieve/#implementations for a full list of sieve client implementations.

Here are some that are Linux/UNIX specific:

kio_sieve: A kioslave for sieve, did not work for me. http://josefsson.org/kio_sieve/
gsieve: A GNOME/python client, did not ./configure on my sarge box. (pygtk issues, what package do I need to install?) http://gsieve.sourceforge.net/
sieveclient: a CLI sieve tool that Simeon Miteff is writing, and also a TLUG project: Sieveclient