11–20 of 25 posts
believe it or not, but many hugely popular applications from 20+ years ago didn't even implement indexing. in this case if you had too much mail your imap client would just time out.
well through the mid-2000s you even had to use a third party plugin for outlook called "lookout" if you wanted searches to not take minutes.
I am Fastmail customer so I have access to their Sieve functionality but decided against it. For me the fundamental limitation is that Sieve looks at email only once, when email arrives. I wanted to do the things like: archive email after 3 days being in my inbox, or older than my most recent read email (which would mean I scanned the inbox and the summary was enough) etc. I ended up implementing a Python script that…
I've been leaning towards local processing on an mbox folder... that would also let me build up multiple Bayesian filters to try categorizing my other mail - why does almost everyone only auto-categorize spam? Google kinda broke out of that with their "social" and "important" semi-categories, but it'd be pretty easy to build in local clients, yet I've never seen it.
I'm not sure Sieve is a language that enables such usage. I know maybe it's a domain-specific language, but since it's a language capable of programming the server, I would rather expect more from it than "it's just yet another way to configure your mail filter".
Fastmail supports Sieve rules which is really nice because I can do all my filtering server-side https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591373-How...
– A notorious spammer that has been spamming me for over a decade that the Fastmail spam filter does not trap[*]. They are easy to screen out via Sieve rules using the "From" header. Except, for 1 out 5 spam emails from them the Sieve rules do not fire, and the spam gets into the inbox.
– Simple email filing into different folders using From/Subject headers. It mostly works except for just a handful senders whose emails Fastmail Sieve do not fire upon no matter how I modify them. They just. do. not. work. I am talking about the most basic From/Subject filing rules.
[*] Spam filtering in Fastmail has been another pet peeve of mine. It is average at best, and mediocre on average. Some spam emails that slip through need to be sent into the spam folder (that has the training enabled) for more than 10x times before*
Fastmail supports Sieve rules which is really nice because I can do all my filtering server-side https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591373-How...
Except Sieve rules in Fastmail either work or do not, and it is non-deterministic. A few notoriously persistent problems I have been facing with them for years: – A notorious spammer that has been spamming me for over a decade that the Fastmail spam filter does not trap[*]. They are easy to screen out via Sieve rules using the "From" header. Except, for 1 out 5 spam emails from them the Sieve rules do not fire, and t…
What you can do though is edit your rule as a seive filter and just add multiple rules in there and it works fine.
I am Fastmail customer so I have access to their Sieve functionality but decided against it. For me the fundamental limitation is that Sieve looks at email only once, when email arrives. I wanted to do the things like: archive email after 3 days being in my inbox, or older than my most recent read email (which would mean I scanned the inbox and the summary was enough) etc. I ended up implementing a Python script that…
this was part of cyrus imap from cmu, which iirc was the first big imap server to support server side indexes. (i think they were bdbs, iirc) believe it or not, but many hugely popular applications from 20+ years ago didn't even implement indexing. in this case if you had too much mail your imap client would just time out. well through the mid-2000s you even had to use a third party plugin for outlook called "lookout…
Folders (mailboxes in proper IMAP lingo) had hand-built indexes. Good stuff. Credit to jgm, the original author.
I don’t know what I would do without sieve, I use it to manage my mailing list subscriptions, eg move to folders, mark emails from specific chatty users as read, etc. It automates a lot of manual cruft and I’m endlessly thankful for it. I do wish it was more widely supported, and I try to do my part to encourage adoption (I maintain several sieve related packages for Arch Linux).