The Horde Groupware Webmail Edition provides a very convenient tool to manage filter rules for incoming emails.

The application is called Ingo and is already included in the webmail edition installation.

You can easily build rules to store incoming emails in different folders, redirect and so on.

I assume that you already have a working mail server (dovecot + unix user accounts are used in my example) and Horde Groupware Webmail Edition installed. If not, check out my tutorial.

The server side filtering will be done by Sieve. The managesieve  service will make it possible to connect with Ingo to create, edit, enable and delete filter rules.

Installing needed packages

apt-get install dovecot-sieve dovecot-managesieved php-net-sieve

 

Activate sieve and managesieve in dovecot.conf

vim /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf

 

# protocol sieve must be enabled
protocols = imap sieve
plugin {
 sieve = ~/.dovecot.sieve 
 sieve_global_path = /var/lib/dovecot/sieve/default.sieve 
 sieve_dir = ~/sieve 
 sieve_global_dir = /var/lib/dovecot/sieve/ 
}
service managesieve-login {
 inet_listener sieve { 
 port = 4190 
 address = 127.0.0.1
 #I only allow connections from localhost 
 }
 service_count = 1 
 process_min_avail = 1 
 vsz_limit = 64M 
}
service managesieve {
 process_limit = 10 
}
protocol lda {
mail_plugins = " sieve"
postmaster_address = postmaster@yourdomain.com
} 

 

Check the dovecot wiki  to understand the different parameters. Note that my configuration is done in dovecot.conf but you could also include the config.d/ folder and add you parameters there.

 

Restarting dovecot

service dovecot restart

Checking syslog for error messages

tail -f /var/log/syslog

 

If you see any dovecot errors, try to find out the cause and fix your dovecot.conf file.

You can use dovecot –n to see the configuration enabled for dovecot.

Let’s see if managesieve is listening at 4190

telnet 127.0.0.1 4190

 

Trying 127.0.0.1...
Escape character is '^]'.
 
"IMPLEMENTATION" "Dovecot (Ubuntu) Pigeonhole"
"SIEVE" "fileinto reject envelope encoded-character vacation subaddress comparator-i;ascii-numeric relational regex imap4flags copy include variables body enotify environment mailbox date ihave"
"SASL" "PLAIN"to"
 
"STARTTLS"
"VERSION" "1.0"
OK "Dovecot (Ubuntu) ready."

 

We can see that managesieve is listening at port 4190 and it’s ready for Ingo to connect.

Now we need to configure Ingo to connect to Sieve.

Move to your-hordemail-directory/ingo/config and create backends.local.php

cp backends.php backends.local.php

Don’t change backends.php as this file will be overwritten when updating Horde.

 vim backends.local.php

Find the below section and set ‘disabled’ => false to true

/* IMAP Example */
$backends['imap'] = array(
// ENABLED by default
'disabled' => true,
'transport' => array(
Ingo::RULE_ALL => array(
'driver' => 'null',
'params' => array(),
),
),
'script' => array(
Ingo::RULE_ALL => array(
'driver' => 'imap',
'params' => array(),
),
),
'shares' => false
);
 

Find the Sieve section and change ‘disabled’ => true to false and make sure that parameters are set as in the below example.

/* Sieve Example */
$backends['sieve'] = array(
// Disabled by default
'disabled' => false,
'transport' => array(
Ingo::RULE_ALL => array(
'driver' => 'timsieved',
'params' => array(
// NOTE: Ingo by default sends only the bare Horde username
// for authentication. Sieve servers generally need both the
// username and domain. See the 'transport_auth' hook for
// an example on how to change the Ingo default behavior. 
// Hostname of the timsieved server
'hostspec' => 'localhost',
// Login type of the server
'logintype' => 'PLAIN',
// Enable/disable TLS encryption
'usetls' => true,
// Port number of the timsieved server
'port' => 4190,
// Name of the sieve script
'scriptname' => 'ingo',
// Enable debugging. The sieve protocol communication is
// logged with the DEBUG level.
'debug' => false,
),
),
),
'script' => array(
Ingo::RULE_ALL => array(
'driver' => 'sieve',
'params' => array(
// If true, use the deprecated 'imapflags' extension to set
// flag status instead of the newer, standardized
// 'imap4flags'.
// 'imapflags' => true, 
// If true, use the deprecated 'notify' extension instead of
// the newer, standardized 'enotify'.
// 'notify' => true, 
// If using Dovecot or any other Sieve implementation that
// requires folder names to be UTF-8 encoded, set this
// parameter to true.
'utf8' => false,
),
),
),
'shares' => false
);

 

Now we need to create hooks.local.php

cp hooks.php.dist hooks.local.php

Don’t change hooks.php.dist as this file will be overwritten when updating Horde.

Enable the following part in hooks.local.php

  public function transport_auth($driver)
 {
    switch ($driver) {
    case 'timsieved':
    // Example #1: Use full Horde username for  password.
    // This is generally needed for sieve servers.
    $full_user = $GLOBALS['registry']->getAuth(null);
    return array(
    'euser' => $full_user,
    'username' => $full_user
    );
    }
 }

After that we write the Ingo configuration file with the following options

You can also manually write the file. It should look like that:

vim config.php

 <?php
 
/* CONFIG START. DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING IN OR AFTER THIS LINE. */
// $Id: 48143d14ef06c07f36427fe5b43981641bdbfdb1 $
$conf['storage']['driver'] = 'prefs';
$conf['rules']['userheader'] = true;
$conf['spam']['header'] = 'X-Spam-Level';
$conf['spam']['char'] = '*';
$conf['spam']['compare'] = 'string';
/* CONFIG END. DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING IN OR BEFORE THIS LINE. */

 

All the setup is done and we can create a  filter rule.

Horde should confirm the new rule once saved.

Congratulations, you are now able to filter your emails in an effective and flexible way.