Using ManageSieve

WebMail Pro allows you to send and receive mails using SMTP and IMAP protocols. However, when it comes to sending and receiving mails, there are things which are done without direct user interaction:

One common thing about the above items is that WebMail Pro cannot do any of those. Action should be performed regardless of whether you're logged into WebMail Pro or not. In fact, mailserver itself needs to perform those actions, but how do we ask it to do that?

That's where Sieve comes into play. In fact, Sieve is a scripting language, and it allows for telling mailserver how it should process mails. Naturally, mailserver needs to have Sieve support, but it's not enough. You will also need ManageSieve service installed on mailserver. Yes, that's right, setting it up on a separate box won't work.

Technically, ManageSieve is a thing somewhat close to FTP server: you cannot upload files to webserver directly, as you don't have access to its filesystem, so you need an intermediary. Similarly, ManageSieve service is a software which lets email client and mail server talk to each other.

There's a good chance that your server already has both Sieve support and ManageSieve service installed, and you'll need to check that first. Since ManageSieve uses port 4190 by default, you can try:

telnet mail.domain.com 4190

and see if you get any response. Also, it may be a good idea to check port 2000. In most cases, Sieve only works locally so you might need to run telnet from mailserver box itself.

If mailserver doesn't have Sieve support, this might get very complicated, up to the level where recompiling mailserver is required. As for ManageSieve, it can be installed and configured relatively simply. For example, there is Pigeonhole agent created for Dovecot mail server. Bear in mind though, we're speaking of mailserver software here, so it's assumed you're pretty good at what you're doing.

In the ideal case, i.e. when Sieve support is available and ManageSieve server is up and running, all you need to do is to enable Sieve support in WebMail Pro.

Sieve functionality is enabled on per-server basis, check "Enable sieve if supported by the server" for specific mail server. If your ManageSieve services uses a non-standard port number, you can specify it there as well:

Configuration of ManageSieve support is defined globally in data/settings/modules/Mail.config.json:

    "AllowFilters": [
        true,
        "bool",
        null,
        "Enables Filters tab in account settings"
    ],
    "AllowForward": [
        true,
        "bool",
        null,
        "Enables Forward tab in account settings"
    ],
    "AllowAutoresponder": [
        true,
        "bool",
        null,
        "Enables Autoresponder tab in account settings"
    ],

By setting those options to true, you can filters, forwarding and autoresponders respectively.

Please note that WebMail Pro uses its own internal notation for Sieve rules, so rules added by other clients will not be displayed.