[Techtalk] Mail handling & filtering

[Terry M. Roy]

On 9/28/21 11:35 AM, Akkana Peck wrote:
> Terry M. Roy via Techtalk writes:
>> I have a couple of Gmail accounts that receive mail containing various
> [ ... ]
> 
> I use mbsync, but in the more normal way, to get a local copy of a
> server's IMAP folders which I can then access with mutt. I don't
> know of any way to get mbsync to trigger something like procmail.

That seems to be the consensus. I ran across a StackExchange discussion 
about being unable to trigger procmail.

> Do the messages need to stay on gmail? If not, one thing you could
> do is a second level of IMAP:
> On the Debian server, periodically run fetchmail (which does work
> with procmail) to suck messages from Gmail though procmail into a
> folder setup on your server, deleting/expunging them from Gmail.
> 
> Then run dovecot on those folders to make them available via IMAP
> to your server, which you can access from anywhere.
> 
> Would that do what you need?

Possibly. I will take a look at fetchmail. Thank you.  The advantage I 
have with gmail is that I can access it through the web. I really don't 
want to set up webmail on my server.

> Another possibility to investigate is notmuch. I think its original
> purpose was searching within maildirs, but I'm increasingly hearing
> from people who use it as a mail user agent, and it apparently can
> also do filtering, so you might be able to run notmuch to filter the
> folders you pulled down from Gmail using mbsync. I'm still vague on
> exactly what notmuch can do: I keep wanting to try it but it
> requires converting my whole mail archive from mbox to maildir and I
> haven't quite come to terms with that. (My incoming folder tree is
> already maildir because of mbsync, but I have many years of mbox
> archives too.) So I have no personal experience, just that it seems
> increasingly popular for searching/sorting mail and apparently is
> very flexible and can do a lot of different things.

I'd run across notmuch and was very confused since it kept saying it 
didn't do much but people were singing its praise.  I will see if I can 
find some more info on it.

Thanks, Akkana.

-- 
Terry