Utilizing Sieve scripts to organize email, locally

Step one: get a sieve script on your disk. I wrote sieve-kde-download.rb to
download all of them from my server.

Then run the sieve-filter command like so:

sieve-filter -Cv -o mail_location=maildir:$HOME/mail:LAYOUT=fs $HOME/.config/sieve/.active.sieve INBOX/Github

Where…

the first file path is the currently active sieve script, the one you want
to run.
mail_location is a path to your local copy of the email. Offlineimap can
help with that.
INBOX is the name of the folder, as would be represented to IMAP clients.
For example, the subfolder ‘Family’ would be represented as ‘INBOX/Family’.

NOTE: Ensure that your offlineimap is configured to use / as the hiearachy separator
rather than a period. If you already did a sync with that, like I did, here’s a
quick one-liner in ruby to shuffle the directories into the correct
subdirectory:

cd ~/mail
ruby -ve 'Hash[Dir["*"].map { |d| [d, d.gsub(/\./, "/")] }].each { |k, v| FileUtils.move(k, v) if k != v and not k.include? "dovecot" }'

Reformatted for readability:

# A hash that looks like {"Archive"=>"Archive", "INBOX"=>"INBOX", "INBOX.Family"=>"INBOX/Family"}
directory_translations = Hash[Dir["*"].map { |dir| [dir, dir.gsub(/\./, "/")] }]
directory_translations.each do |old_name, new_name|
    if old_name != new_name # Don't try to move a folder into itself
        unless old_name.include? "dovecot" # skip the files that dovecot makes when running sieve-filter
            FileUtils.move(old_name, new_name)
        end
    end
end

And an example configuration of offlineimap:

[Repository Local]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/mail
sep = /
# etc...

Actually going for it

Now that you’ve ran sieve-filter at least once in debug/non-execution mode,
and seen what it will do, it’s time then to actually effect change in your
mailbox.

To do so, run the same command, but now with the -e flag. Easy, but this is
the scary moment! Hope your sieve script is correctly configured!

You may want to clean up all of the crap dovecot leaves behind:

fd -0 dovecot mail/ | xargs -0 rm

Preparing to be able to run sieve-filter

Of course it’s not so easy, you have to do the following:

pacman -S pigeonhole which will install dovecot and it’s sieve extension
sudo cp -r /usr/share/doc/dovecot/example-config /etc/dovecot so that there
is some sort of configuration, any kind, on the system
Edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/90-sieve.conf - set a value you’re happy with for
where the sieve scripts will live. I like not having a ton of dotfiles in my
home dir, so I changed it like so:
```
plugin {
  sieve = file:~/.config/sieve;active=~/.config/sieve/.active.sieve
}
```

Further documentation can be found at Dovecot’s website.

Additional sieve examples

here are some links to interesting, additional sieve scripts for your reference:

(check logseq notes)

Backlinks

Sieve