Sieve E-mail Filtering

The JeffSys server now supports the "Sieve" filter engine, which allows you to organize your e-mail by creating rules that automatically move messages into the right folders. Most e-mail programs already provide filtering of some kind, but if you use multiple programs (e.g. your phone, your laptop, SquirrelMail) then your filters won't work unless the right program is running. Sieve solves this problem by performing the filtering at delivery time on the JeffSys e-mail server.

You can create and manage Sieve filtering rules using any program that supports the Sieve protocol. This page explains how to do this.

If you're interested in technical details about Sieve, visit the Sieve Documentation web site. For other ways to manage rules, try the Sieve Clients page.

IMPORTANT: Sieve is a replacement for the old Procmail engine -- your Sieve rules will be ignored if Procmail is enabled. If that's happening to you, please ask a JeffSys administrator to disable Procmail for your account.

If you have a shell account, you can disable Procmail yourself by typing this command:

mv ~/.procmailrc ~/.procmailrc-disabled

Creating Filters Using SquirrelMail

SquirrelMail is the web mail service provided by JeffSys.net. It provides a very simple way to create and manage Sieve filtering rules. Although this is the easiest approach, it is not as powerful as other methods that allow you to write Sieve scripts directly.

1. To access your web mail, follow the instructions for SquirrelMail on this page.

2. Once you have logged in to SquirrelMail, click "Options" at the top of your screen. Find the section that says "Message Filters", and click on that link.

3. Then click "Add New Rule" and fill out the condition and action for your rule. Here is an example rule that looks for messages received from "joe@example.com", and then moves them to a folder called "Mail From Joe":

4. You can test your rules by having a friend send an e-mail to you.

Creating Filters Using Thunderbird

You can also create Sieve rules using the Thunderbird e-mail program for Windows. (Click here to learn more about Thunderbird.)

1. Open the Thunderbird application. In the main menu, click "Tools -> Add-ons". Use the search box to find the "Sieve" plugin, and then click "Add to Thunderbird" to install it.

2. After restarting Thunderbird, you should see a new menu command "Tools -> Sieve Filter Settings", which opens up this page:

3. Click "Change Settings" as shown above, and then enter the Host and Port information shown below. Note that the JeffSys Sieve protocol uses port 4190 (not the old default port 2000).

4. Close the settings pages. In the Thunderbird main menu, click the menu command "Tools -> Sieve Message filters". If you see a warning, click "Continue" as shown below. Then click the "New..." button on the right to create a new mailfilter file.

IMPORTANT: Thunderbird allows you to create multiple filter files, but only one of them can be active at a time. (If you have a shell account, this corresponds to the ~/.dovecot.sieve symbolic link.) SquirrelMail's settings are saved in a file called "phpscript" -- do not edit that file.

5. The script editor is shown below. It includes a help reference for the Sieve language, and a tool for validating your scripts. For more information about the Sieve scripting language, read the FastMailWiki BasicSieve article.

Have fun! Please report any problems you encounter.