IMAPFilter

IMAPFilter is a completely free and open source command-line software implemented in C and designed from the offset to act as a simple, yet intuitive mail filtering utility for POSIX compatible mail servers and operating systems, such as GNU/Linux and BSD.

The program can be used to easily and quickly flag, delete, move, and copy email messages. It supports the 4.x branch of the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) protocol, and uses Lua for its configuration.

How does it work? Simple, when executed it uses IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to connect to a remote mail server, then it sends searching queries to the respective server and processes mail accounts based on the results of the queries.

Features at a glance

Key features include definition of filters, size/date/status of a message, support for logical operators, list available and/or subscribed mailboxes, internationalisation (I18N) support, server namespace support, TLS and SSL support, as wel as IMAP STARTTLS support.

Command-line options include the ability to specify a custom configuration file written in the Lua programming language, as well as the ability to specify debug and log files. It is also possible to specify a command or view the program’s version.

Getting started with IMAPFilter

To install the IMAPFilter program on your GNU/Linux computer, you must download it from Softoware, where it is distributed for free as a universal sources archive (tarball). Save the archive on a location of your choice and extracted its contents using an archive manager tool.

Open the Terminal app, navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softoware/imapfilter-2.5.7) and run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program.

Install it system wide by running the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user. Then, run the ‘imapfilter’ command to view its usage message and learn how to use it.

What is new in this release:

• Support for automatic validation of SSL connections, using the operating system's installed trusted CA certificates (usually from authorities that are shipped with web browsers).
• A new "wakeonany" option makes it possible to end IDLE mode on any event, not just on new messages.
• A new "reenter" option controls whether IDLE mode should be re-entered, after the recovery of the session, which makes it possible to continue with the execution of the next line in the configuration file.
• The documentation now mentions that the contain_*() methods do case-insensitive searching (an IMAP limitation).
• The documentation now has a better explanation of the arrived_*() and sent_*() methods.
• Bug fix; the value returned by the copy method was incorrect in some cases.

What is new in version 2.5.6:

• Possible to build again with OpenSSL older than version 1.0.1 (was a requirement for the previous release due to new protocols TLS 1.1/1.2).
• Support for reading the configuration from the standard input stream.
• New makefile dist target, which can be used to create distribution archives.

What is new in version 2.5.2:

• This version introduces functionality to cope with persistent errors and connection failures when running in daemon mode.
• It also fixes a bug related to the failure handling during login and logout.

What is new in version 2.4.2:

• This version fixes a problem where some ASCII characters in mailbox names were incorrectly converted to UTF-7.

What is new in version 2.4.1:

• This version fixes a problem that caused the become_daemon() function to fail.

What is new in version 2.4:

• This version introduces support for non-ASCII mailbox names and a new environment variable to set the configuration directory.
• A bug that caused problems when parsing some server responses was fixed.
• Another problem when matching header fields, where the whole field instead of only its body was matched, was fixed.
• A misleading error message printed during debug file checking was corrected.

What is new in version 2.3:

• This version introduces support for appending and uploading messages to mailboxes.
• A bug which caused a mailbox to be incorrectly assumed selected was fixed.
• Another problem where some servers required an update of their capabilities after login was fixed.
• A timeout error during CRAM-MD5 authentication was fixed.

What is new in version 2.2.2:

• Bug fix; a couple of errors in the extending examples file.

What is new in version 2.0.11:

• A bug concerning fetching of messages with empty bodies was fixed, and a workaround was added to get mailbox status from some problematic servers.

Requirements:

• Lua
• OpenSSL