Dovecot LDA, Offlineimap and Sieve

[Tim Gray]

On Jun 22, 2012 at 01:13 AM +0100, Johnny wrote:
>You mean, you fetch the mail via offlineimap, and then send it back to
>a single folder on the server and when fetching it with getmail retrieve
>it through Sieve? Or is is sendmail going through Sieve?

Yeah I was unclear there :)

Here's what goes on.  I have a couple folders on my IMAP server.  All 
but one are synced with offlineimap, including INBOX, Sent, Drafts, and 
some other relevant folders (work, etc.)  The only one that isn't synced 
is 'MailingLists'.  Mail is sorted into all of these folders by the 
server side sieve implementation - my imap server provides that.  For 
example, all mailing list mail, identified by a couple generic filters 
(look for list-id headers, etc), gets put into the 'MailingLists' 
folder.

On my laptop, offlineimap syncs all the folders but MailingLists.  Then, 
I run getmail which only retrieves mail from MailingLists.  That dumps 
retrieved messages into Dovecot LDA/sieve, running locally, which sorts 
my mail according to specfic mailing lists and dates.  For example, this 
mailing list goes into a maildir 'lists/offlineimap-2012'.

So... There are two instances of sieve running.  One on the server, 
doing a rough sort, which gets email out of my inbox that I don't want 
to have to deal with on my phone.  offlineimap syncs the bulk of my 
folders.  Then, getmail gets the last folder and sends it through the 
second instance of sieve, which sorts mail locally.

It's a bit overboard, but seems to work.  If you didn't mind storing ALL 
of your mail in your IMAP folders, then server side filtering is 
definitely the way to go.  I used to get a LOT of mailing list mail 
which I didn't want stored permanently on IMAP, which is how I arrived 
at my current setup.  I've also looked into filtering with imapfilter 
and maildirproc - both nice programs but Dovecot seems to work best for 
me.  imapfilter filters email remotely on the server.  maildirproc 
watches over local maildirs and sorts there.  offlineimap works with 
either, but might have to sync mail in one direction or another after 
the filtering is done.

Hope that makes sense.  Let me know if anything doesn't.