How to implement server-side email filter rules based on address book that moves incoming messages to a folder

emailimap

I have a lot of assorted email being sent to my pobox.com address for various reasons. I want to find a way to continuously filter the incoming messages, so that the ones from news services go to a News folder, the ones about my bank accounts go to a Financial folder, etc.

The primary motivation for doing this is my smartphone, i.e. visibility of new personal email messages soon after they arrive. I want to know when personal messages arrive, by means of the number ticking upward on the live tile of my Inbox (Windows Phone). But I don't care about all the automated email and newsletters that are sent to the same Inbox.

The most powerful way to do this is to manage an address book for each subfolder: News, Financial, etc., and enforce a rule for each folder: "If sender is in my address book X, then move the message to folder X".

By implementing my rules this way, I am keeping personal email in my top-level Inbox folder, while relegating all non-personal email to subfolders for later review. It's a process of elimination. If a person I haven't heard from in 10 years contacts me, their message does not get moved away to a place where I might miss it. By the same token, if I subscribe to a new newsletter, it is easy to add the sender's address to my News address book.

However, the only way I have found to implement this type of rule is Thunderbird filtering rules. When I subscribe to a new newsletter, it is simple to add the sender's address to my News address book.

The downside to this approach is that I have to keep Thunderbird running at all times. When Thunderbird goes down, all the unimportant messages clutter up the Inbox on my smartphone.

So I'm asking for alternative solutions. Possibilities:

  1. Direct my pobox.com email to a provider that can enforce these rules on the server side.
  2. Run an additional IMAP client on a server of my own. I have a NAS that runs Linux. Is there an application that could poll my inbox for new messages and enforce the filter rules?
  3. Run an app on my smartphone (WP 7.5) that enforces the rules. This is not optimal but it would be interesting to know if an app existed for this.
  4. Something I haven't thought of yet.

Best Answer

I have been exploring this question a bit myself and I found POPFile an interesting solution. Especially in combination with its IMAP module, it seems to be providing very similar features as Sanebox for free.

Although the project doesn't seem to be actively developed any more, I found it easy to install the program testwise on my Windows 7 PC. While I have not gone further than this myself, I can imagine that installing this on some server that is on 24/7 could work as a free sanebox replacement, at least for the technophiles amongst us.

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