Yays!

Today i’ve done it. I’ve acquired my email dream!

I’m talking about a nearly-automated @heick.email

…to explain…

For years, if you ever wanted to send me an email I would say:

“Just put your name at the front of @unliterate.net, and i’ll get it.”

Ever since I setup my email @unliterate.net wrong as a catch-all SPAM domain, I’ve had to deal with the following rigmarole when getting new email setup:

1. Get the name@unliterate.net figured out
2. Setup a folder in Thunderbird, my email client
3. Setup a mail filter rule in my email client to move the received message from my Inbox to that folder

Which things have been working for years, and it’s been a fairly straightforward approach.

Until I got married, and we decided to get the heick.email domain and have all our mail shared.

…how to share the email…

So, the @unliterate.net experiment utilized POP3 as the server for me to get all my catch-all. This was easy to configure, and was fairly straightforward.

We needed to be able to share email across computers and devices, though, and still have the flexibility to do the “folder structure”-thingy that I’ve grown comfortable with the @unliterate.net “mail filter” rules.

So, the only solution is to go from POP3 to IMAP.

IMAP gives us the flexibility of folders on the server, not on the client. It also stores all the mail there, and the protocol (after swallowing that it’s not like POP3) is actually quite orderly and simple.

So, i’ve employed dovecot as my IMAP server, which was also my POP3 server, and configured it simply to enable IMAP and know where I want my users mailboxes to be stored.

After setting up DNS for mail, i’ve got email coming into @heick.email, and I’m happy.

I just need to be able to now do the mail filtering…

How to automate folder-making for IMAP

This was a basic challenge, and I love challenges.

I had to use my programming language of choice (PHP) with the php-imap module loaded, and fancy up a script that runs on a */1 (1 minute) cron task.

The script is as follows:

<?php
/**
 * The whole purpose of this script is to perform the following:
 * 1) Open an IMAP connection to an INBOX
 * 2) Look through all the messages
 * 3) Grab all messages and look for the first "To: " header in each message
 * 4) If the person in the "To: " is in the allowed domain
 * - We grab the user
 * - We check to see if their is a mailbox for that user, and move the messge there
 * - We delete the message
 * 5) If the person is not in the allowed domain
 * - We move the message to a default folder
 */

function get_imap_folders($resource, $config)
{
 // Get a list of mailboxes
 $original_folders = imap_listmailbox($resource, "{" . $config['server'] . ":" . $config['port'] . "}", "*");
 // these come through as {server:port}mailbox, so we just clean them up a bit
 $new_folders = array();
 $to_remove = "{" . $config['server'] . ":" . $config['port'] . "}";
 $folders = str_replace($to_remove, "", $original_folders);
 return $folders;
}

$config = array(
 'server' => 'localhost',
 'port' => '143',
 'username' => 'redacted',
 'password' => 'redacted',
 'folder' => 'INBOX',
 'spam' => 'SPAM',
 'debug' => true,
);
$debug_message = "";

$res = imap_open("{" . $config['server'] . ":" . $config['port'] . "/service=imap/novalidate-cert" . "}" . $config['folder'], $config['username'], $config['password']);
if (!$res)
{
 if ($config['debug'])
 {
 $debug_message = "IMAP Stream Failure";
 }
 die($debug_message);
}

$folders = get_imap_folders($res, $config);

// Lets get all the mail messages in the $config['folder']
$mbox = imap_check($res);
$number_messages = $mbox->Nmsgs;
if ($number_messages == 0)
{
 if ($config['debug'])
 {
 $debug_message = "No Messages";
 }
 die($debug_message);
}
$range = "1:" . $number_messages;

// now, we'll get the messages
$messages = imap_fetch_overview($res, $range);
foreach ($messages as $msg)
{
 $msgno = $msg->msgno;
 $to = $msg->to;

echo "Message: " . $msg->subject . "\n";
 if (strpos($to, "@"))
 {
 $array_to = explode("@", $to);
 $to = $array_to[0];
 }

// do we need to create a folder to move this message into?
 $destination_mbox = "{" . $config['server'] . ":" . $config['port'] . "}" . $to;
 if (!in_array($to, $folders))
 {
 if (imap_createmailbox($res, $destination_mbox))
 {
 echo "> Created folder [$to]\n";
 }
 else
 {
 echo "> Failed to create folder [$to]\n";
 }

}
 $folders = get_imap_folders($res, $config);
 if (imap_mail_move($res, $msgno, $to))
 {
 echo "+ Moved successfully\n";
 }
 else
 {
 echo "- Failed to move message\n";
 }
}
imap_expunge($res);
imap_close($res);
?>

To explain, basically this access my IMAP server, gets all the folders, then gets all the mail. It goes though the “to:” portions of the email addresses and sees if I have a folder that matches what’s in the name part of the email address in the “to:” portion. If it doesn’t exist, it makes the folder. Then, as a final result, it moves the mail to that folder and aborts.

So, this script now runs every minute, checking for new mail, creating the folders necessary and moving the messages.

vivre heick.email!