sift

sift is a simple utility which is designed to allow you to conduct operations upon the messages located upon a remote IMAP server.

I found this utility as I was writing a similar imap sorting daemon. Why rewrite code when its already there?

Many thanks to Steve for this awesome program and saving me countless hours of tinkering and swearing. I hope to add something of merit to the program.

Sample Usage

To get started you'll need to create a text file containing your login details and a collection of rules. Then you may pass that filename as an argument to sift.

Here is one of the simplest possible rulefiles:

server:   imap.gmail.com
username: somebody.says
password: testing

folder:inbox status:new mark:read

This marks all new messages in the "inbox" as being read.

How Sift Works

Each sift rule is considered as part of a chain. By default when you select a folder to open all messages are selected.

Rules in the chain have two purposes:

1. Refine the list of selected messages.

2. Perform an operation upon ech of the currently selected messages.

For example this will select all messages:

folder:inbox

This will delete all messages:

folder:inbox delete

The "delete" operation deletes all currently selected messages.

To refine thing you may reduce the messages selected by filtering on different fields. For example:

folder:inbox subject:foo delete

This will reduce the selection of all messages to all message containing the word "foo" in their title - then delete them.

Primitives

As explained there are two types of primitives, or rules, available.

Those that change the selected messages on some criteria, and those that operate upon the list of selected messages. These are known as either "selection" or "operation" rules.

Selection Rules:

• folder:foo Select the specified folder. To ease use with Googlemail all '#' characters are converted to spaces. This allows the following rule to work as expected: "folder:[Google#Mail]/Spam delete"

• body:foo Reduce the working set to those messages which contain 'foo' in the body of the message.

• !body:foo Reduce the working set to those messages which do not contain 'foo' in the body of the message.

• subject:foo Reduce the working set to those messages which contain 'foo' in the subject.

• !subject:foo Reduce the working set to those messages which do not contain 'foo' in the subject.

• from:whom Reduce the working set to those messags which contain 'whom' in the sender address.

• !from:whom Reduce the working set to those messags which do not contain 'whom' in the sender address.

• to:whom Reduce the working set to those messags which contain 'whom' in the recipient adress.

• !to:whom Reduce the working set to those messags which do not contain 'whom' in the recipient address.

• status:[new|old] Select only messags with the given state. "new" means unread, and "old" means messages that have been read.

Operation Rules:

• copy:bar Copy all currently selected messages to the folder 'bar'.

• delete Delete all currently selected messages.

• move:bar Move all currently selected messages into the folder 'bar'.

• mark:[read|unread] Mark all selected messages as either read/unread.

• exec:/usr/local/bin/foo Run the program "/usr/local/bin/foo" with the body of each selected message passed as STDIN. This program is executed once for each selected message.

• execonce:/usr/local/bin/foo Run the program "/usr/local/bin/foo". This runs the program only once regardless of the number of selected messages.

• dump Provide a brief dump of the selected messages; their sender, recipient, and subject.

Feedback?

The original author no longer maintains this software, please contact h4unt3r through github, send issues, comments, etc.

Comments welcome to the author.
Go check out Steve's website here: https://github.com/skx/
Or check out his github here: http://www.steve.org.uk/

--h4unt3r