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19th April 2008

So I've written a quick hack. A client-side filter/utility program for working against IMAP servers.

Consider it a general purpose system which is similar to Procmail, but applied after your remote machine has already done the sorting.

Here's a flavour:


<GMail>
  username somebody.like.me
  password yeah.right
</Gmail>

<Folders>
  <livejournal>
        unread exec /usr/local/bin/notify "Livejournal Comment"
        mark read
  </livejournal>

  <inbox>
        mark read
  </inbox>

</Folder>

What does that do? It first of all logs into GMail with the given username and password, then selects two folders:

=livejournal/

For each unread message in the folder it runs the specified command with STDIN being the message body.

Then it marks each new message as "read".

=inbox/

This simple rule just marks all messages as read.

Why? Well I have a bunch of folders on a bunch of gmail accounts and I don't pay attention to them - but some, specific, mails should result in an SMS being sent to me ... so I need to do something clever.

I'm sure with a bit of effort this could be made IMAP-server independent, and could have a more flexible matching system. The simplicity right now comes about primarily because i dont want to parse a config file.

Anyway, suggestions for potential features are welcome. It does what I need as-is, even if it isn't pretty.

ObQuote: Lost Boys

Tags: gmail, hacks, imap, perl, sift. | 2 comments.

Comments On This Entry

  1. [gravitar] JD Submitted at 07:41:07 on 19 April 2008
    Just wondered if you'd looked at imapfilter before you wrote this. It's in Debian. The config file is basically a lua script.
  2. [author] Steve Kemp Submitted at 12:15:14 on 19 April 2008

    D'oh!

    I did search, but managed to fail to spot that. It looks great, with one minor exception - I dont want to write a program to process the mails, I want to write a rules file.

    Other than that though ideal. I even like/love lua!

    My specific goal was do do simple things like:

    • If the folder X
    • Contains a new message.
    • With "foo" in the subject.
    • Then run program Y with the message piped to it
    • And mark the message as read.

    I guess there are more general things you could do, such as matching body-text, etc, which would be fun to add, but not required by me personally.

    I will need to think which is least effort:

    • Converting imapfilter to read some rules.
    • Adding a rule-language, or different config format to my toy program.

    All my code is very clean and minimal, thanks to Net::Imap::Simple[::SSL] so I'd not be too upset to abandon it!