[Kde-pim] Re: IMAP filtering doesn't work?

[Enda Cronnolly]

On Saturday 21 May 2011 08:58:47 Stephen Kelly wrote:
> Tobias König wrote:
> > On Saturday 21 May 2011 08:17:45 Stephen Kelly wrote:
> >> Hi,
> > 
> > Hej,
> > 
> >> I was pointed to this on my blog:
> >> 
> >> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=255388
> >> (Kmail filters dont work in incoming mail)
> > 
> > After a short glance at the code it seems that the FilterManager will
> > only act on new emails that are in a collection with remote id 'inbox'
> > (see Kernel::folderIsInbox() in kdepim/mailcommon/mailkernel.cpp).
> > 
> > So we should ask the bug reporters if this applies to their setup. We
> > have one bug report about broken filtering with POP3, where the target
> > folder of the POP3 resource is != inbox.
> > 
> > The correct fix for this would be a list of collections that the filter
> > code shall look in. And the POP3 resource and KMail allows the user to
> > add additional collections to this list.
> 
> Is it normal to only filter inbox?

There are two use cases:

1) Automatic filtering
Its is normal to only use automatic filtering on new mail arriving in the 
inbox. To apply to all folders could result in a loops with filed messages 
matching a filter rule and then being moved into the folder where they already 
reside.

2) Manual application of filters
It is normal to use manual application of filters on all folders

It is generally considered inappropriate for an MUA to provide filtering on 
IMAP from the client side. This should be done server side, ie. the IMAP 
filtering should only be configuring remote sieve filters if the server supports 
it. This avoids the need to have the same filters running on all MUA's on all 
devices that the user reads their IMAP mail on, otherwise, for example, they 
may see unfiltered messages in their inbox when viewed on an iphone until such 
time as they fire up their desktop MUA.

For this reason, most MUA's only provide filtering for POP and no filtering for 
IMAP.

I would suggest that IMAP filtering be provided only as an interface to 
configure server side filtering and for now to consolidate the SIEVE 
integration. It is really up to the MTA developers to extend access to to 
their filtering scheme if an IMAP MUA is going to avail of it. The other widely 
deployed server side filtering program that I am aware of is maildrop, but I'm 
not aware of any remote configuration interface to it.

 -Enda.
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