Category: MobileMe

Conditionally rewriting mail subjects using exim4

Since MobileMe sadly does not support filtering using RegExps, and I get a lot of heterogenous system mails from our computer systems here, I implemented a workaround. I added some text like [System] to the subject, which can be filtered fine by MobileMe.

All of our machines here send their mail to a central smarthost running exim4. All the system mails are directed to “root” at some of our machines. What I did was first adding a file /etc/exim4/exim.filter containing this:

# Exim filter
if "$h_to:" matches Nroot@.*.your.domain.deN then
headers add "New-Subject: [System] $h_subject:"
headers remove subject
headers add "Subject: $h_new-subject:"
headers remove new-subject
endif
Since we are running Debian, running exim4 in split configuration, I also added the file /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/80_exim4-config_system_filter, containing this:

system_filter = /etc/exim4/exim.filter

After that I had to run update-exim4.conf and /etc/init.d/exim4 reload. Then I was all set up.

Pimping MobileMe #1: Expiration dates on folders

Well, MobileMe does not yet support the expiration of mails in folders. Especially for mailing lists, I want this feature. After let’s say 90 days the mails should be automatically deleted. I do not need to store mailing list contents for longer. So I took the nice tool imapfilter and wrote a config file that expires old mails from a selection of folders. I installed a cronjob on my web server that now automatically calls imapfilter every night. The config file (~/.imapfilter/config.lua) looks like this:

Myaccount = IMAP {
   server = ‘mail.me.com’,
   username = ‘your.name@me.com’,
   password = ‘yourpassword’,
   ssl = ‘tls1’
}


folders = {‘folder1’, ‘folder2’, ‘folder3’}


for k,folder in pairs(folders) do
   foldername = ‘Mailinglists/’ .. folder
   results = myaccount[foldername]:is_older(90)
   myaccount[foldername]:delete_messages(results)
end

My mailing lists are hosted under a sub-folder called “Mailinglists”, as you can notice in the config file above. You can tweak this to your liking. It might also be useful to set different expiration dates. It’s easy to augment the lua script to do so.