Quote:
Originally Posted by markwolk
I am looking for an email hosting service that allows to
1) COPY (not move) message(s) from one folder to another
2) filter and file messages in two folders simultaneously
... just as Tuffmail.
Any suggestions?
|
Anywhere that has RoundCube installed (provided it's an uptodate instance not ancient) allows that, I think. The provider I use which has RoundCube has its "managesieve" plugin installed; I don't know whether that provides the on-server filtering or (probably judging by its name) the web-based configuration of the Sieve filters. One can edit the filter script via the RC GUI but it's not clear how or if one can keep one's own changes separate from the bits that RC will (re-)generate if one changes something via the GUI later on.
I also use Fastmail. Its basic filters are aimed at people with limited needs, but one can set a different mode and access many more types of condition. The GUI-driven configuration doesn't seem to allow one to direct copies of mails to several places though there is a "copy-to" action (which I think sends one to a specified email address, as well as a "redirect-to" action). However you can also edit the Sieve script which their GUI creates and place your own rules in marked areas of the script (so they persist even if the auto-generated part changes) and Sieve itself allows you to direct copies of mails to multiple folders (via its "fileinto" verb).
Both systems let you define rules with single or multiple conditions, single or multiple actions, and you can choose (for each rule) for a matching rule to be the last rule considered or let filtering go on to consider other rules as well.
Both systems have a wide variety of pre-defined conditions, but you can also use regexes so they support arbitrary complexity.
In both cases you can download the scripts ... which I do every so often in case I need to recreate them elsewhere. It's also a lot easier to search a text file containing a script than to find the right rule in some circumstances since the GUI dialogs letting you pick an existing rule to edit it don't show the entire rule. In RC there's just a rule name (so you need to have some sort of naming scheme that makes sense to you) and in FM there's an optional name, the start of the condition(s) and the action.
I have hundreds of rules in each system, and neither is particularly good at managing big lists of rules, but it is possible. With the RC ones, the rules are stored in name order so the rule names not only have to mean something to you but also the order they'll be considered in.
In FM you can drag and drop rules into any order you want, and you can also filter the display of rules - although that does help you find particular rules it doesn't help much in managing them because a filtered display might eg show both the rules you have that contain "sausage" but does not show you the intervening rules which might also affect mails filtered by the two rules you can see.
In the FM system I divide my rules into named sections eg all the rules that filter just on Subject are in one group, all those that filter on List-ID are in another, and so on. I delimit those groups by dummy rules that are easy to spot in the list of all rules. Eg before the Subject ones I have a dummy rule that actually tests if the List-Id is
"------------------------------------------------------ SUBJECT"
(which it will never be) but that
Mail list id is "------------------------------------------------------ SUBJECT"
line is easy to see in the overall list because of all those dashes.
Oh - as TenFour says - one can choose (in Settings -> Preferences) to use gmail-style labels in Fastmail, or folders, or to swap back and forth as needed. For me, folders works fine.