I'm working on my email system. My server is a little short on resources, and so far I have only used POP to retrieve my email, but now I'd like to set up an IMAP server on the box. However, I'm on a lot of mailing lists, and the list email may well be retrieved and filtered on the client side, i.e. by KMail, and then deleted from the server automatically. However, if I do access my email with other clients (such as my mobile phone), it is useful to have some degree of filtering.

So, my idea is to have a few Sieve filters on the IMAP server, which filters spam, cron-messages, etc, to their final destination. Then, a Sieve filter which sends all list messages to a temporary folder on the server. Then, I configure KMail to retrieve this remote folder and filter the messages to their final destination on the local machine, then delete the message from the server?

So, my question is if this is practical to do with Kmail?

I'm still on KDE 3.5, but I plan to upgrade to 4.2 once Kubuntu 9.04 is released.

This approach should work fine, assuming the temporary folder is accessed over POP. KMail's filtering doesn't work too well with IMAP. It can move mail to Disconnected IMAP fine though.

bcooksley wrote:This approach should work fine, assuming the temporary folder is accessed over POP. KMail's filtering doesn't work too well with IMAP. It can move mail to Disconnected IMAP fine though.

Ah, that sounds nice! I've been looking around for IMAP servers, and Dovecot seems nice. It has both a IMAP and a POP server, and they seem to share the same mail location. And that's fine, it is nice to be able to access the inbox with POP, I think.

But then I'd need a separate POP server for the lists. I guess I could run a different POP server on a different port?

Or would there be a better way to do this in practice?

A seperate POP server would not be required, the only requirement is that KMail accesses the mail to be filtered using POP. You can use IMAP Folder subscriptions to hide the folder that KMail will filter.