Maybe someone will help me. A rare thing to ask, but I cannot get sieve to work on my server. The plugin page, on the dovecot website, appears rather simple.

http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Sieve

Install dovecot, then activate the sieve plugin. Here is what happens. I setup sendmail to use dovecot’s deliver and mail is no longer being accecpted from external ip address. The instructions say to create a dovecot.m4 file as reference it as a mailer in sendmail.mc. The file contains:

######################*****##############
### DOVECOT Mailer specification ###
##################*****##################
Mdovecot, P=/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver, F=DFMPhnu9,
S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrFromSMTP,
T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
A=deliver -d $u

And the reference is indeed in sendmail.mc. While using smtp, and local as mailers email is received from external addresses. When using the dovecot mailer only local messages are processed. Also the local messages are not processed by sieve. I place .dovecot.sieve in my users home directory, but it does not work. I have read that it needs to be compiled into .dovecot.sievec, but I cannot find a sievec binary in my Debian OS. I’m thinking this has to do with permission issues. Maybe if I setup a new mail server, and have dovecot use mailboxes within the root partition, directly from /var/mail/%u then dovecot will have read/write permissions to the mail folders. Maybe this will allow sieve to compile the filters. Time permitting I will try this.

The setup instructions seem so simple:

protocol lda {
# Support for dynamically loadable plugins. mail_plugins is a space separated
# list of plugins to load.
mail_plugins = cmusieve # … other plugins like quota
}

Above simply shows how to load the cmusieve plugin in the lda protocol. This makes sense because the lda protocol will be used when the dovecot.m4 file is called by sendmail. But ultimately I have no server side mail filtering. Currently I use Thunderbird, client side, to filter my mail. Sometimes there is a delay and a message marked as spam, by the server side spamassassin, makes its way to my cell phone.

I really want server side mail filtering so I can logoff the desktop environment when I am not at home. But because Thunderbird must be running, to provide me functional filtering services, I cannot logoff. I really want to work this out. Any input from a reader will be appreciated.