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hendryx hendryx
 
M$10 January 04, 2009 12:31 AM

What email service offers the best truly dynamic filtering of email to folders, and supports access via IMAP?

To expand on the question a little:
1) Allows access to the "search" folders via IMAP.
2) The "search" folders are truly dynamic meaning that if the conditions of the folder's filter where changed, then email that did not meet the conditions would no longer appear in the folder and vice-versa.
3) The dynamic filtering is done on the server and so no filtering is done by the IMAP client(s).

What I'm looking for here may not even exist. If so, feel free to give your answer to what you feel might be the next best solution that comes close to what I'm looking for. (Bash/Applescript maintenance scripts, similar services, etc)
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Best Answer  Chosen by Asker

chn-cs-htg chn-cs-htg
 
 January 04, 2009 02:09 AM
Gmail allows for most of the features you are asking for....you may need a 3rd party software to aid it, though.
Asker's Rating:
• From all the solutions given, gmail seems to be the closet to what I was looking for.

While someone else phrased this answer better much later on, I decided to award this as the best answer due to a) the speedy response time, and b) the fact that it started a good discussion on implementation.


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hendryx hendryx
 
January 04, 2009 03:11 AM
Gmail does seem to come closest to what I'm looking for. The only issue I've really run into with Gmail is that I believe that the filters can only be applied when the filter is created/edited, and when the mail first arrives to the account.

If someone knows of a 3rd party utility, or has tips and examples on how to code external filters to re-label Gmail messages, please let me know.

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chn-cs-htg chn-cs-htg
 
January 04, 2009 03:34 AM
I'm not sure what you mean. The filter will take affact all all mails fitting the description, wether it is already in your mailbox or if it is yet to come. Moreover, you can have multiple filters doing similar tasks: for example, you can label all mails from ebay as "eBay", and have a specific ebay seller's message labeled something else more specific. Unlike the folder scheme, one piece of mail can have multiple labels and you can easily create temperary filters that do not serve any long-run purposes.

Upon the removal of a label, all its effects are gone, so re-labeling is easy and without undesired effects.

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hendryx hendryx
 
January 04, 2009 05:20 AM
When you create or edit a filter in Gmail, it can be told catch all matching email that Gmail holds for you. Also when you receive new email, it will filter the email applying the label if appropriate. But outside of these events there are currently no other times when Gmail normally will try to reapply your filter and thus re-label messages. That is what I'm talking about.

With further infestation, I think this may well be the approach I try. The key thing here is that when you create or edit a filter to apply a label you can select the option of "Also apply filter to 'x' conversations below."

Using this fact and a clever bit of scripting, I think I should be able to write some code that will automate the actions of a user removing all labels from their email and then stepping though each rule and reapplying them as needed. For my purposes I would probably only need to run such a script once a day to tidy up my email, but its a possible solution.

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Other Answers (3)

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xds xds
 
January 04, 2009 12:52 AM
The one that isn't complete yet.

Check it out.


http://www.ZENBE.com

They are now out of beta. :)


EDIT I:

Silly me a video might have helped :P

Source(s):
My Brain.


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hendryx hendryx
 
January 04, 2009 05:21 AM
I just wanted to comment on why I've not really said anything about Zenbe as a solution so far. Thank you for being so quick to reply to the question, and a few moments after your answer was given I checked out there website and signed up for an account.

However at the time of writing I'm still waiting for them to send me an email to verify my existing email address. I can't really say more about Zenbe until I've finally had a change to log in and see how it works live.

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xds xds
 
January 04, 2009 05:43 AM
You may need to send them a feedback mail as they have been doing a extreeeeeeeeeeme amount of updates lately , adding allot more imapi support to there system. which you can read about in there forums.

I would let you use my account to login however i don't know if the makers of this site or zenbe's would have any objections to that.

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xds xds
 
January 04, 2009 05:45 AM
Their*


grrrr :o/ , Firefox has got to go.

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ilaksh ilaksh
 
January 04, 2009 02:20 AM
If its just for you then I think you are better off just dealing with the closest thing you can find in an online service.

If you were going to configure/script something like that I think some variation of this type of thing might work:

http://wiki.dovecot.org/HowTo/RefilterMail

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hendryx hendryx
 
January 04, 2009 03:21 AM
Thank you for the Dovecot Refilter answer and link. My personal email is currently stored on a maildir based IMAP server, so if I can't find ether a pure solution, or a way to manipulate the labels in Gmail better then there is a good change I'll try something like this.

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ilaksh ilaksh
 
January 04, 2009 03:24 AM
yeah if you figure out how to make the gmail filters dynamic like that please post it on here because i went into my gmail account and looked and it didnt seem like it did what you were saying.
anyway the gmail filters are awesome generally so hopefully they will be good enough for you because trying to configure or script that doesnt seem worth it for just one person (unless you really like configuring linux apps and writing scripts for that sort of thing).

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xds xds
 
January 04, 2009 04:33 AM
Why not just forward everything to GMAIL and then send it to zenbe ?

This way you will have copies if one service goes down.
That would be a great setup and probably what i'm going to do myself in the future.

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razorboy razorboy
 
January 04, 2009 07:01 AM
Incoming Email Into Folders using yahoo

sources:
http://help.yahoo.com/tutorials/mmail/mmail/mm_filter1.html


Yahoo Gives IMAP Access to All Users Through Zimbra Desktop

sources:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_imap_zimbra_desktop.php
http://yahoo.weblogsinc.com/2006/06/24/yahoo-mail-getting-free-imap-access/

filter using windows mail

sources:
http://www.web-articles.info/e/a/title/Creating-Rules-for-Filtering-Email-using-Windows-Mail/

configuring imap acess using gmail for windows mail

sources:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77696

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