I have to admit I am a bit unorganised in the email department! In fact,  that’s a bit of an understatement!

I am extremely unorganised in the email department!

Due to different projects, and historical reasons I have several domain names, with different email addresses associated to them.  These emails all go to different popbox’s, most are picked up by my windows box at home (all to individual accounts) And in theory I then check my mail every so often. In truth, due to the number of accounts I do not check them as often as I should and I now have a dozen accounts all with several thousand unread emails in them.

“Right!” says I, “This needs to be sorted!“. But what to do?, I could merge them all into one account, so everything gets delivered to the same folders, then write a load of email filters to organise the mail into appropriate folders, so its easier to manage. “Right, I’ll do that!“. Wait a second. What if my windows machine doesn’t have it email client open? the filters wont run and the mail will be scattered, what if I’m on a different machine, with a different email client, No…. There must be a better way to run email filters.

“What if I run them at the server level?”

Now that’s an interesting thought. Actually add a section in the exim configuration to check a database of rules and deliver accordingly. Then have a simple control panel where users can add rules based on sender, local_part, domain, recipient, subject and have the email delivered into the corresponding sub folder.  This would mean your email was sorted as soon as it was delivered, regardless of what email clients you have open and where.

Well I was after a new project to play with for a bit, and it looks like this may just be the one.  I have exim, mysql, courier all installed and running on my home gentoo server, so time to forward a few of my domains at that IP and start playing.

Watch this space…….