Filtering by Return-Path ?

[ProfFrink]

Hi,

I'm new to runbox, just trying out the 30-day evaluation, and I'm quite impressed.

I do have one problem though, that is quite vexing: I have subscribed to some mailing lists, and was hoping to use runbox's filters feature to automatically put their messages into a special folder for each. A quick look at the headers of some of the messages revealed that their most distinguishing header is "Return-Path". For example:

Return-path: <haskell-bounces@haskell.org>

Having figured this out, I went to the manager->filters page, and setup a filter like so (I am subscribed to a number of mailing lists from haskell.org):

Active
Messages where: "Return-Path" contains "haskell.org"
will be: "saved to folder" "Haskell-Mailing-Lists"

Order is "0" and there are no other filters.

It doesn't work! The messages just get dumped in my Inbox. I have tried a number of combinations putting the whole "haskell-bounces@haskell.org" and even including the angle brackets, but no luck.

Help... What am I doing wrong here?

[hajonez]

Hi ProfFrink,

Welcome to Runbox! Glad to hear that you have been impressed by what you have so far seen of the Runbox service. I've had an account for almost three years now and have been *very* pleased with the reliability, speed and features of the service.

I'm not entirely sure why your 'Return-path:' filter is not working. It certainly seems as if you have tried a number of different combinations in the hope of having the filter catch messages from the Haskell mailing list. I trust that you clicked the 'Active' radio button when setting up the filter; by default, neither 'Active' nor 'Inactive' is selected when adding a filter and it is very easy to forget to click to make it active. I know I've certainly made this mistake in the past!

The other thing I would suggest is that you filter by 'Header' rather than 'Return-Path'. 'Header' checks the entire header of incoming emails to determine whether there is a match. If you filter by 'Header' and check for the entire email address listed as the Return-path (i.e. haskell-bounces@haskell.org), I think it might be successful.

Good luck!

- Henry

[ProfFrink]

Thanks for your help, Henry! I used your suggestion of using "Header" and it now works.

I am still a bit puzlled about why it didn't work with "Return-Path". Is it possible to get a formal reply from Runbox here?

-Thanks

[carverrn]

I confirmed that setting a filter on "Return-Path" doesn't work. Maybe it's doing a case sensitive check for "Return-Path" and most of the time the header says "Return-path". Trond or Geir will have to check. For now, as Henry said, you'll have to use "Header".

Regards,
Rich

[Geir]

The Exim-filter variable name was wrong - it is fixed now and seems to work correctly.

- Geir

[tore]

Originally posted by carverrn
I confirmed that setting a filter on "Return-Path" doesn't work. Maybe it's doing a case sensitive check for "Return-Path" and most of the time the header says "Return-path". Trond or Geir will have to check. For now, as Henry said, you'll have to use "Header".

Actually, I believe "Header" won't work either. The reason why the filter doesn't work is because it checks for a header named Return-Path. While this may make sense when looking at the full source of an e-mail after delivery, there is a good reason why it won't work. RFC 822 (section 4.3.1) states that the Return-Path header shall be added to the message by the MTA as the last thing that is done before delivery. In Runbox' case, this is after the headers are parsed for filtering.

Filtering on Return-Path shouldn't be much of a problem, though, as Exim has intrinsic support for matching on it. That the web application now checks the header Return-Path (instead of Exim's $return_path variable) is probably a bug, and likely an easy one to fix.

You'll have to ask Geir or Trond when they intend to go about doing that, though - I don't generally touch the web application code.

[Geir]

By the way, Tore works at Linpro and currently does most of the filtering backend for RMM - besides admin and maintenance work in general.

- Geir