Gmail… IMAP… filters… /me sighs
Well, due to some changing circumstances, I decided I’d try to get a better handle on my email and maybe move to using IMAP instead of downloading all my mail. There are some really irritating reasons why this is a bad idea (in my case).
Google’s use of labels is neat, and it makes IMAP folders. Very cool. That works well. But those filter rules are absolutely infuriating! I like to get some of my mail sent to my blackberry… stuff that is meant, directly, to me. So it has to have my email address as the To: field, but I also want this to come absolutely last, after all the other filters. It doesn’t look like there’s any kind of ordering, and no support for anything moderately advanced. I found a few tutorials that allow you to use advanced boolean style arguments for searching mail, but they don’t seem to work the same for filters.
So I spent about an hour fiddling with this and realized that no matter how much technology advances, nothing will ever replace fetchmail+procmail+mutt for me. It just can’t. I don’t think I’m abnormal in how I deal with my email, but for crying out loud, can they possibly dumb it down any further? Or make finding the information to do anything with it more difficult? How hard would it be to do a search and then have a “make this search a filter” type option? And I’d really like to know about filter ordering, because if there is a particular order, then I might be able to live with it (i.e. filter out all mailing lists into their separate labels and then forward what’s left to my blackberry).
Misc
You should take a look at imapfilter, for remote imap filtering. Quite powerful, I used it on a exchange server for 3 years without trouble. You can move, copy, delete mail absed on various criteria.
The only problem is that the config is in lua, so yu have a new language to learn, but that’s quite easy and the examples are quite good.
Jan 22, 2009 @ 16:09:48vdanen
Hmmm… I wonder how that would work with gmail. I’m not confident in their “standards” at the moment. Fiddling with an IMAP client to delete everything in the spam folder somehow moved it all to my inbox and when I finally turned fetchmail back on, I had almost 1200 spam in my inbox that was downloaded. =(
Jan 22, 2009 @ 16:47:14Adam Williamson
Why not just run fetchmail + procmail + courier and have your own damn IMAP server? That’s what I do. I have a VM on my dedicated VM host machine that runs as a mailserver: fetchmail, procmail, courier and postfix. I can use it directly as an IMAP / SMTP (authenticated, obviously…) server from any system, and my webserver VM runs roundcubemail so I have a nice AJAX-y webmail frontend to it, for use from any system where I can’t use a dedicated email client.
Been working very nicely for several years now.
Jan 22, 2009 @ 22:27:09Misc
Then i suggest to open a 2nd gmail account to check , and to forward some of your spam, etc on this mailbox, and then play with it.
But according to http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2008/03/03/a-few-months-of-google-imap-lets-evaluate, you seems to be quite right with the imap implementation of google.
Jan 23, 2009 @ 03:37:58vdanen
Adam: I thought about that. I thought about using fetchmail+procmail on my server, and having procmail filter into mailboxes for me to use with dovecot (already using exim for outbound mail so no changes there). So the advantage there is I can use any imap client to connect from anywhere, and I also thought about roundcube which is pretty slick.
But, aside from logging in from any old computer, I didn’t much see the point as I can currently ssh into my box to use mutt. So I lose the “use my mom’s computer” to check email, but I don’t think I’d ever do that anyways, and besides, anything coming to me personally ends up on my blackberry.
I think it would be more effort than it’s worth. If I were using a GUI mail client and not mutt then it might be worthwhile, but I still find all GUI clients suck compared to mutt. =)
Misc: I’m going to look at that blog post. Thanks for that.
Jan 23, 2009 @ 08:13:24Mike
Gmail’s IMAP implementation sucks. Any email you delete from the inbox just has the “inbox” filter removed – it still resides in the archive. In many cases, you’re also downloading emails twice, or more.
I’m using Dreamhost’s email right now, but there’s also GMX.com if you’re looking for a free alternative with some sane IMAP.
Jan 25, 2009 @ 00:48:36