The Joyent Community

If you are using Outlook Express, it will not apply message rules (filters) to IMAP or HTTP accounts, only POP accounts.

I'm not sure whether you could apply message filters to IMAP accounts with Thunderbird.

Procmail sounds like a good approach. I am using Panther's Mail.app. But yes, it would be great to filter server side into folders.

Thank you for all your prompt responses, guys.

Thank you, Moon.

I have managed to set up filters with OSX Mail which work fine but want to look it filtering server side, so it can work when with webmail.

If you're using IMAP (like me) and you want your mail to be filtered regardless of what client you use to check your mail (like me) then you'll have to use procmail. It's easy to set up, and basic filtering is pretty easy, but it's very powerful, and can get complicated.

Here's the easy 1-2-3 to set it up:

1. Create a .procmailrc like this:

## basic procmail setup

VERBOSE=off

MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir

PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail

LOGFILE=$PMDIR/logs


    

    
include specific rule files

INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/general.rc # miscellaneous rules

INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/lists.rc # mailing lists

    

    
anything not matched: throw it in the INBOX

:0

$MAILDIR/

That sets up the basic config for procmail, and sets up a default rule to put everything in your INBOX. The two INCLUDERC lines include other files that contain your actual filtering rules, although you don't have to use INCLUDERC, you can put the filtering rules right in your .procmailrc. Your choice.

2. Anyway, I've got a separate set of "rules files", in my .procmail directory.

Here's a sample from my lists.rc

# Six Apart Professional Network

:0

    

    
^List-Id:.*Six Apart Professional Network
    
    
    


$MAILDIR/.Saved.Lists.6A\ Professional\ Network/

    

    
.NET mailing list hosted by Stanski
    
    

:0
    

    
^Sender:.*dotnet-owner@stanski\.com

$MAILDIR/.Saved.Lists.AU\ DotNet\ \(Stanski\)/

That's how I filter two of my lists, the 6A ProNeT list is filtered on the List-Id header, and the Stanski .NET list is filtered on the Sender header. This is where you'll need to find a good tutorial on how procmail rules work. They're not that hard. They procmailex manpage has a bunch of examples, but I'm sure there are better resources out there. If you know basic regular expression syntax you'll have no problems.

Note that it is very important that the last line of each rule (the place where you want the mail to go) ends with a slash (/). This tells procmail to put the message in Maildir format. If you leave the slash off procmail will deposit the mail in mbox format.

3. Okay, now you need to turn it on. That's easy. Just put this line in your .forward:

Right, now you should be filtering your mail. Good luck!

Last edited by stewartj (2005-03-17 14:45:50)