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Bug 216959 - Evolution should generate and maintain Sieve filter scripts
Evolution should generate and maintain Sieve filter scripts
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: evolution
Classification: Applications
Component: Mailer
3.10.x (obsolete)
Other All
: Low enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: evolution-mail-maintainers
Evolution QA team
evolution[filters]
Depends on: 221381
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2001-12-08 19:17 UTC by jeremy
Modified: 2019-09-04 17:14 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description jeremy 2001-12-08 19:17:17 UTC
Description of Problem:

Sieve (RFC3028) is a server-side filtering language which is designed to
allow mail servers to do mail filtering in a safe way.  The most common
implementation is probably the one in Cyrus Imapd.

Evolution's filter interface should generate sieve scripts and maintain
them on the sieve server.
Comment 1 Jeffrey Stedfast 2002-01-03 21:30:23 UTC
except that Cyrus imapd is the only server that actually supports this
:\
Comment 2 Jeffrey Stedfast 2002-04-11 01:06:22 UTC
patches are welcome ;-)
Comment 3 Jeffrey Stedfast 2002-05-27 08:04:14 UTC
it's not worth our time to implement this since nothing actually uses
it out there in the Real WOrld (tm).
Comment 4 David Jander 2005-07-29 12:00:10 UTC
This is not true. We use it in the "Real World(tm)", and I am pretty sure, 
that if email clients finally start to support it, much more people will use 
it, because it is a "Good Thing(tm)". 
I use KMail mostly right now, but if evolution supports this first, I'd switch 
immediately, and I'd have a good reason to encourage deployment of a windows 
port of evolution throughout the whole company I work for! 
 
Comment 5 André Klapper 2006-02-03 09:01:29 UTC
ok, i'm quoting murray from the mailing list here:

"Cyrus is not the only IMAP server supporting Sieve:
http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/#implementations

Dovecot IMAP server also now support it:
http://wiki.dovecot.org/DovecotFeatures#head-cba5e5ad54ae095d800a548bf5b3bfd881d568e4

As well as Horde, Squirrelmail, and probably other webmail clients
support Sieve.  

I also noticed adding Sieve support was pretty high up in the list of
Thunderbird 2.0 features."
Comment 6 Jesse Norell 2007-06-11 18:45:40 UTC
dbmail also supports sieve, and the MANGAESIEVE protocol.  There's definitely a shortage of user-friendly sieve clients now - native support in Evolution would be wonderful.  Now that sieve components are pulled out of cyrus and put into a library (libsieve), likely more and more servers will join the ranks, too.
Comment 7 Matthew Barnes 2008-03-11 00:28:24 UTC
Bumping version to a stable release.
Comment 8 Marco Marzetti 2008-03-20 00:40:37 UTC
I personally consider lack of Sieve support a big mistake!
Here you can find official ( alpha ) support for the language on mozilla-thunderbird http://sieve.mozdev.org/
Comment 9 André Klapper 2008-03-20 10:57:37 UTC
and I personally look forward to contributed patches providing Sieve support - feel free to help by writing them!
adding a "project X ships support for Y, why does Z not support Y?" comment won't change anything. provide code instead.
Comment 10 Marco Marzetti 2008-03-20 14:40:34 UTC
First of all: I'm sorry!

I'm disappointed because of this bug has been opened ~6 years ago, and one care about it (IMHO).
Anyway, since i'm not a programmer i could only wait for a good guy and version2.22!
Comment 11 Pupeno 2008-08-25 19:30:15 UTC
Hello,

I'm very interested in getting Sieve support on Evolution. For the record, Courier, another MTA, also supports Sieve. It's webmail allows you to edit Sieve rules, so it might be interesting to see how it does it to follow a similar route.

Thanks.
Comment 12 Paul Bryan 2008-08-25 23:32:58 UTC
Dovecot also has Sieve support[1], and also sports a native ManageSieve server[2].

[1] http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Sieve
[2] http://wiki.dovecot.org/ManageSieve
Comment 13 Götz Waschk 2009-05-27 14:39:38 UTC
My company's mail server has just switched to dovecot, Sieve support is still in demand.
Comment 14 Matthew Keller 2009-08-13 19:03:12 UTC
FWIW: We've been running dovecot for a while, and just implemented Sieve support, which is supported client-side by the Windows and Mac MUAs used here, as well as our webmail system (SquirrelMail). I'm contemplating moving to Thunderbird as the benefits of server-side filtering outweigh my love for Evolution (which I've used since the early Ximian days)
Comment 15 Tadej Janež 2011-01-15 12:59:00 UTC
In hopes of resurrecting interest in ManageSieve protocol support in Evolution, I'm adding myself to the Cc of the bug.

It's been more than 2 and half years since the last comment and in the mean time, the smart phone revolution happened. This means much more people read their email from several locations (home, work, phone) and the need for server-side filtering has increasing dramatically. Managing this filters with clients like Evolution is the next logical step. It would be very nice if Evolution could step-in to fill this need.
Comment 16 André Klapper 2011-01-15 13:06:45 UTC
Nobody works on this and nobody plans to. Patches welcome.
Comment 17 Tadej Janež 2011-01-15 14:08:31 UTC
André, thanks for taking the time and explaining the status of Sieve support.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time and skills required to provide the patches.

Regards,
Tadej
Comment 18 Mirosław Baran 2011-01-29 23:05:28 UTC
André, thank you very much for your long, thoughtful and extremely useful answer. 

Care to elaborate on why do you refuse to implement sieve filter management and the managesieve protocol?
Comment 19 André Klapper 2011-01-29 23:23:36 UTC
Mirosław Baran: You are very welcome, but unfortunately I do not know which of my "long answer"s you refer to. Maybe you refered to a different bug report?
But as Evolution's source code is available, can you please elaborate why you yourself refuse to provide a patch to fix this and instead add comments that don't add any value to solving the issue?
As it seems that you are very interested in this functionality and have unlimited time and ressources I am looking forward to your sharing of your patch. Thanks in advance for your contribution.

In short:
*** Please do not post comments in Bugzilla that do not add any technical value and just create bugmail for everybody. There are forums for this kind of communication. You have been warned. Thanks for your understanding. ***
Comment 20 Olav Vitters 2011-01-30 04:03:02 UTC
Mirosław: Trolling is not appreciated on GNOME Bugzilla. You've been banned.
Comment 21 Johannes Rohr 2017-10-02 20:23:58 UTC
Just to bring this issue back to memory. This feature request is now 16 years old, and sieve support in dovecot is very stable now. It is a pity that hardly any mail client supports it.
Comment 22 André Klapper 2017-10-02 23:02:49 UTC
Comment 16 still applies. :) https://wiki.gnome.org/Git/Developers
Comment 23 Milan Crha 2019-09-04 17:14:21 UTC
There had been filled a GitLab request for the same [1], thus I'm closing this in favor of that request. See it for any further updates (no, still no plan to work on it, I'm sorry).

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/issues/607