Subject: sieve for spamfiltering and greylisting

From: Dilyan Palauzov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 12:41:35 +0100

Hello,
   What happens with a mail between the end MTA and the mailbox? First  
(optionally) greylisting, then (optionally) spamfiltering and at the  
end )optionally) sieve-filtering. All this (optional) steps could be  
up to the user to be configured, hence each of them requires different  
interface:
   - one interface for conf. the personal grey listing
   - one interface for configuring the personal spam settings and
   - managesieve for configuring the personal filters.

   It is a bit cumbersome, as all these settings are related to the  
same thing (mail delivery from the users' point of view), but setting  
them up requires different approaches.

   Maybe you have discussed it already, but recently I was thinking on  
uniting all this settings into one. And my idea concrete is either to  
extend sieve to support settings for external programmes or to define  
sieve extensions per purpose (hence one extension for both configuring  
spamassassin and dspam). In the first case just the name of the  
programme will need to be specified and it will be able to define what  
will happen afterwards with the parameters (and be able to get them  
from the script), e.g
   require "prog";
   prog grey-listing 10 30
   (meaning that the mail shall be retried not later than 30 minutes  
and not earlier than the next 10 minutes, in order to pass the  
grey-filtering, or wise-versa - it will be up to the interpreting  
programme)
   prog spamassassin rewrite_header nanana

or in the second case we define a keyword per purpose, the sample  
sieve script could look like

   require "spam", "grey-listing"
   spam rewrite_header nanana
   grey-listing off

   Where the meaning of spam rewrite_header and/or grey-listing off is  
defined by a sieve extension/capability.

  That's all, I just wanted to share the idea. Of course such an  
approach would require the management of several other applications,  
but at the same time it supposes for the future even wider support for  
sieve, both in the spam-programmes and in the tools for managing  
settings. Actually my initial idea was to extend managesieve to upload  
the settings for different applications - once for sieve, once for  
spam-settings, but later I thought it would be better to alter the  
language itself.
   Greetings,
     Dilian