Introduction

Avelsieve or, verbosely, "SIEVE Mail Filters Plugin for Squirrelmail" is a Squirrelmail plugin for creating SIEVE scripts on a Cyrus IMAP server that runs timsieved (Tim's SIEVE daemon).

Avelsieve will also be a part of Cyrusmaster, a web-based Cyrus administration tool. It should provide the same interface of the user's filters to administrators and/or helpdesk staff.

SIEVE is a mail filtering language, intended for server-side filtering of emails. See RFC 3028 and Cyrusoft's page about SIEVE for more details.

Latest Version is 0.9.11 (Released 17-May-2004).

About this implementation

The web interface provides a wizard-like interface that, in the end, creates part of a SIEVE script, a so called rule. It then assembles all the rules to form a SIEVE script.

For the sake of user-friendliness, it provides only a subset of SIEVE's functionality; the main goal was to provide a simple interface for Joe User to create server-side filters without knowing anything about the language itself.

The plugin does not provide a parser; instead, it saves PHP meta-data in the script itself, in order to continue editing and manipulation of the filters. The only thing that is supported is a script called "phpscript" on the Cyrus server. Multiple scripts are not supported yet. I've tried to make it sane enough that it won't break a lot. Some more testing is needed - hence the beta status.

Status

This is beta software. It has been out for a while and is known to work pretty well. You'll have to check for yourselves if it is for a production environment. Features (and bugs) are added every other day. Insert standard GPL_Disclaimer(); here.

Features

This plugin provides:

Simple HTML, no Javascript.
Match messages based on email headers, size, or apply to all messages.
Configurable number of header matches.
Support of keeping a message, move to an existing or new folder, email redirection.
Supports SIEVE Vacation.
Supports SIEVE Notification action.
Runs through all the rules, but supports a "stop" command when a rule matches.
Change the order of rules - or delete them altogether.
Make a textual description of the rule.
Localizable.
Automatic adaption to the capabilities of each site's SIEVE.

..but does not provide:

A SIEVE parser.

Screenshots

If you'd like to take some quick look before installing, here are some screenshots of avelsieve in action:

Action to take in a rule

Header match definition

The table that lists all the rules

Demo

Aside from the screenshots above, you can see the plugin in action, if you wish. Check the Live Demo page for more information.

Requirements

It has been tested with Cyrus IMAP server and its timsieved SIEVE parser.
Squirrelmail version 1.4.0 or greater.
sieve-php.lib, a PHP class for transporting SIEVE scripts, by Dan Ellis. Included.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Author

Alexandros Vellis, Network Operations Centre, University of Athens
(Personal home page).