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<div id="me12643">
<div>Ken,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Check out Zed Shaw's very cool Lamson project.</div>
<div>http://lamsonproject.org/</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Malcolm</div>
<div> </div>
<div>----- Original message -----</div>
<div>From: "Ken Seehart" <ken@seehart.com></div>
<div>To: python-list@python.org</div>
<div>Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:33:26 -0800</div>
<div>Subject: IMAP mail filters tool</div>
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<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I'm thinking of possibly making a simple client-agnostic tool for filtering and processing IMAP email. I'm a Thunderbird user, but I'm interested in a tool that is not client software specific.<br>
<br>
So I am is checking for prior art. Does anyone know of a filter tool with most of these features? <br>
<ul>
<li>Written and customizable with python</li>
<li>IMAP based</li>
<li>Runs on client (i.e. without installing anything on the server)</li>
<li>Runs completely independent of client software (though could be launched from any email client that can support it)</li>
<li>Automatically suggests new rules based on manual movement of emails into folders (based on comparison of all header data across all existing folders)</li>
<li>Take arbitrary actions in response to rules (e.g. universally denying access to spam senders to all online cheese shops)</li>
<li>Capable of serving as a prototyping framework for things like spam filtering</li>
<li>General filtering functionality, not particularly focused on spam</li>
<li>Posts and updates rules to server via IMAP (i.e. by sending and automagically processing a special email message).</li>
</ul>
Typical work-flow would be aimed at users who like to automatically sort their email prior to reading it. The goal is to have nearly all email sorted into folders so that most mail remaining in the Inbox is likely to be leftover spam missed by whatever spam filters are being used. In other words, the filters tend to effectively serve as white lists.<br>
<br>
Examples of unusual rules that don't seem to be supported by most email clients:<br>
<ul>
<li>When you send an email, add the recipient to a filter such that email from that recipient goes to a "Unfiltered Replies" folder if it does not match any other filter.</li>
<li>Receiving email with certain fields matching certain regular expressions could automatically create a new folder and filter e.g.:
<ul>
<li>List-Id: "SF Bay Area Python group <baypiggies.python.org>" yields a new folder "Lists/SF Bay Area Python group" with a corresponding rule</li>
<li>X-Launchpad-Bug: "product=phatch; milestone=..." yields a new folder "Bugs/Phatch" with a corresponding rule</li>
<li>X-Bugzilla-Product: "Shrubbery" yields a new folder "Bugs/Shrubbery" with a corresponding rule</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
Thanks,<br>
Ken<br>
<br>
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