Introduction

Avelsieve or, verbosely, "Sieve Mail Filters Plugin for Squirrelmail" is a Squirrelmail plugin for creating Sieve scripts on a Sieve-compliant mail server.

Sieve is a mail filtering language, intended for server-side filtering of emails. For more information, please visit http://sieve.info or read RFC 3028.

Avelsieve can either run using different backends, with regard to the storage of the Sieve scripts. Currently, three backends are available:

1. ManageSieve: This is the transport protocol for uploading, editing, deleting and verifying Sieve scripts on a mail server. A daemon usually listens to port 2000, where clients such as avelsieve can connect and manage the scripts.
   Examples of server implementations that support ManageSieve:
   • Cyrus IMAPd running timsieved
   • DBMail
   • Isode M-Box
2. File Backend: For simple storage of scripts in the filesystem. (For instance, the Exim MTA supports such scripts).
3. LDAP Backend: This is a specialized, contributed backend for users of Sun Messaging Server.

More implementations can be found at http://sieve.info/implementations.

In the future, 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.

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

• Devel Branch (1.9): Considered beta quality. This release should be considered 'beta quality'. At the moment it works for me without any major glitches, but who knows, there might be a bug that DoS'es the Apache Server by eating all of its memory in there.
• Stable Branch (1.0):
  This plugin 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. Insert standard GPL_Disclaimer(); here.

Features

This plugin provides:

• Simple HTML interface.
• Javascript functionality that enhances the user interaction, however there is HTML-only fallback for accessibility.
• 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.
• Create a rule on-the-fly, while reading a message in Squirrelmail. This function will auto-detect List-Id: headers for mailing lists.
• Runs through all the rules, but supports a stop command when a rule matches.
• Change the order of rules - or delete them altogether.
• Enable / Disable rules on the fly, without deleting them.
• 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. Yet.

Screenshots

If you'd like to take some quick look before installing, you can check out some screenshots of avelsieve in action.

Demo

You can see the plugin in action, if you wish. Check the Live Demo page for more information.

Requirements

• A Sieve management daemon (ManageSieve-compatible). It has been tested with Cyrus IMAP server and its timsieved Sieve parser. There have been reports about it working with DBMail, too.
• Squirrelmail version 1.4.9 or greater.
• The multibyte string (mbstring) PHP extension is very much recommended. It provides very robust conversion between character sets. Otherwise, recode or iconv will also do the job.
• sieve-php.lib, a PHP class for transporting Sieve scripts, originally by Dan Ellis. Included.

License

Author