Email filtering

[sandyd]

I currently have a hosting account at a serverhost that uses roundcube. I defined some filters to place emails in certain folders - but apparently they are only run when I open roundcube, as I can see my account unfiltered if I open from IMAP or SMTP.

Is there an external mail client or something that I can run on a separate server to filter the email into the correct folders?

[CharlesA]

I use Thunderbird to do my filtering for me.

Not sure if you'd want to do a push/pull or something to the current mail server or just connect a client to it and pull the mail from there via imap.

[sandyd]

I use Thunderbird to do my filtering for me.

Not sure if you'd want to do a push/pull or something to the current mail server or just connect a client to it and pull the mail from there via imap.

I have too many random clients that I connect using - and I dont keep my computer on 24/7

[SeijiSensei]

Install procmail on the server. Then you can place "recipes" into a .procmailrc file that will sort your mail automatically upon delivery. For instance, let's suppose you want anything with a subject that includes the word "Frozen" put in the "frozen" folder. In ~/.procmailrc, you'd create this recipe:

:0
* ^Subject:.*frozen
frozen

Comparisons use extended regular expressions and are case-insensitive by default. Read "man procmailrc" and particularly "man procmailex" for details.

Sorting into folders is only one of many things you can do with procmail. For instance, I wrote a script to handle non-delivery notices for some listservers I host:

# filter nondelivery notices
:0
* ^To:.*owner-*
* ^Subject:.*deliver|^Subject:.*failure|^Subject:.*returned|^Subject:.*ndn
| /home/scanner/ndn-handler

That pipes message to the non-delivery handler that are sent to "owner-something" and include one of the trigger keywords in the Subject line. You can also have procmail examine the entire body of a message as well.

Procmail has sometimes been called the "Swiss army knife" for mail administrators with good reason. It's installed by default on RedHat-flavored machines, but not on Ubuntu.