[Users] How to direct mail to separate boxes from single address.

[Steve Litt]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2017 13:59:34 -0500, John Culleton
<john at wexfordpress.com> wrote:
> I had this feature set up for many years. But now I have a new
> computer and I forget how I did it.
> 
> Here is the situation: One of my email addresses is
> john at wexfordpress.com. At this addy I get mail from several mailing
> lists. I want to redirect some of this email into separate boxes, like
> direct all mail from this list to a box called "claws-mail". I know
> how to create the mail boxes. I can select all mail in my general
> inbox from a particular mailing list and move to another box
> manually. I want to automate the process. I did this before with some
> lines in my accounts structure but I forget how I did it, years ago.
> 
> All replies welcome.


Hi John,

Claws-mail can do this all by itself, but to present a more diversified
view let me tell you how I do it...

I use Claws (and all other email clients I ever use) as a mere window
into my local Dovecot IMAP server, located on my desktop machine. Every
3 minutes, my Fetchmail daemon retrieves and deletes mail from gmail
and my Troubleshooters.Com webhost, sending all those emails to
Procmail. My procmail recipes send the emails to different folders in
Dovecot's Maildir storage mechanism, so when I look at my Dovecot IMAP
with Claws (or Thunderbird or Alpine), I see a bunch of new email in
various folders. Here's the procmail recipe for Claws-Mail:

:0:
* ^(To|Cc).*users at lists.claws-mail.org
.claws/

The forward slash on the end of ".claws" tells Procmail it should
insert into a Maildir system instead of an mbox system. Note the
(To|Cc) instead of the mailing list ID. The mailing list ID was a good
idea, but fails miserably because of all these people who think it's a
great idea to copy me when posting to the list (as if I'm not on the
list, given that I just posted there), or more bizarrely reply directly
to me and cc the list. (To|Cc) tends to work much better under such
conditions, and works fine even for the majority of people who simply
reply to the list.

There are two advantages of the way I do it:

1) Dovecot is a much faster and more reliable store of emails than any
   email client's folders.

2) My Dovecot repository means I can read my email with any IMAP
   competent email client: For troubleshooting, for special
   capabilities, or if my usual email client stops working for some
   reason. Also, if Claws-Mail were to ever self-destruct the way Kmail
   did six years ago, switching clients would be dead-bang easy,
   whereas with Kmail it took me over a week.



SteveT