Idea Man

I want to be able to use any capable IMAP email client (okay, there aren’t too many capable ones I know…) and be able to manipulate my email filters at the server level instead of at the client level. A couple of reasons for this are…

If I set a filter (ex: a vacation response message) I don’t want to have to keep my local email client turned on to process the message.
If my computer croaks I do not want to have to rebuild all of my email filters.
Part of my job is testing different email applications, I should only have to create the filters in one place. Right now we use the CommuniGate Pro email server here at work and I am testing its MAPI connector for outlook and its pretty slick. Within outlook you can manipulate your server side email filters. I don’t think it would be rocket science to create an XML language that defines how a filter works (ex: the filter has a descriptive name like “Trash messages from Janet” and it has some parameters to follow like “If the senders email address is janet@interplanet-janet.com” then tie an action to it like “move to the IMAP ‘trash’ folder”. Of course you could have multiple parameters and actions and they just end up being more tags inside the XML for that filter. What would be great is if you could store these XML filters on a different server using https or something and just point your email server and your client at it (just like you can do with an address book in LDAP). The server can point to it to know how to process your messages and the client needs to point to it so you can use tools to add/edit/delete your email filters.

I think I’ll get started on it (:^)