Sonic.net

kgc wrote:In doing so, we'd likely support sieve on the server side but there's quite a bit of functionality lost.

Well, I can't speak for other procmail users, but a full sieve implementation (as much as dovecot supports) would work for me. I think the biggest missing feature would be piping the message to a program. However, this sounds like you might be planning on doing a stripped-down implementation; if so, just how stripped down are we talking?

I really just was referring to the loss of being able to easily process mail with external programs. We may come up with something like allowing user to shunt their mail flow to the shell server where they could run procmail and imap (but not enjoy all features that the primary mail services might offer like full text indexed searches.)

kgc wrote:We may come up with something like allowing user to shunt their mail flow to the shell server where they could run procmail and imap (but not enjoy all features that the primary mail services might offer like full text indexed searches.)

Wait. If you're using dovecot, wouldn't we still be able to access email via IMAP, without having to go through any weird mail shunting? (Forget procmail -- I'm just talking about plain IMAP email access.)

As for procmail: I'm just guessing, but I think the main (but certainly not the only) use of procmail external programs is for notifications. For all its "modernness", sieve is downright anachronistic when it comes to notifications. However, it appears that pigeonhole 0.4 and later (for dovecot 2.2 and later) does support an extension that allows users to run a site-specific (site-hardcoded) list of external programs. If sonic could somehow support the more common notification mechanisms, that would be great.

darrylo wrote:

kgc wrote:We may come up with something like allowing user to shunt their mail flow to the shell server where they could run procmail and imap (but not enjoy all features that the primary mail services might offer like full text indexed searches.)

Wait. If you're using dovecot, wouldn't we still be able to access email via IMAP, without having to go through any weird mail shunting? (Forget procmail -- I'm just talking about plain IMAP email access.)

Yes, of course, you'd still get IMAP. What I meant is a complete separate IMAP server that used spools on the shell server should you absolutely need to have procmail in the delivery path.

darrylo wrote: As for procmail: I'm just guessing, but I think the main (but certainly not the only) use of procmail external programs is for notifications. For all its "modernness", sieve is downright anachronistic when it comes to notifications. However, it appears that pigeonhole 0.4 and later (for dovecot 2.2 and later) does support an extension that allows users to run a site-specific (site-hardcoded) list of external programs. If sonic could somehow support the more common notification mechanisms, that would be great.

We'd obviously need to include a vacation and generic autorespsonder but I"m not sure what other ones would be required.

kgc wrote:We'd obviously need to include a vacation and generic autorespsonder but I"m not sure what other ones would be required.

Well, if you want to have a chance at getting rid of procmail, you'd need the ability to file mail into folders, as well as forwarding them. You'd need the ability to look at the common headers, such as From/To/Cc/Reply-To/Subject, and regexp support is essential (it's already a plugin). As much as I'd love notifications, I'm not really expecting Sonic to support that (well, no more than MS exchange support ). As long as IMAP IDLE works, I can hack a notification system at my end.

What do you mean by notifications?

kgc wrote:What do you mean by notifications?

Smartphone/tablet notifications:

• Sieve, for all of its "modernness", is still years behind the times, as far as notifications go. "Notifications" in sieve are "email" or "jabber", with "sms" in one implementation (pigeonhole??).
• As I've said, I really don't expect Sonic to do anything about this. (Z-push or a hacked-up sieve plugin would be great, but unrealistic.)
• This type of notification is actually a workaround for the fact that most email servers don't support push email/notifications, which generally requires the use of Microsoft Exchange or something else that supports activesync.
• A long as Sonic supports IMAP IDLE in their servers (which dovecot does support, as long as you have it enabled), I can hack together a notification service at my end.