dovecot - Aug 2005 - Feature Request - wild idea - folders for executing programs

Timo,

I have a wild idea for a feature that is somewhat unusual, would be very 
powerful, and easy to implement. What I want is ...

Special folders that when someone drags a message into them - it pipes 
the message into a program.

The reason I want this is - for example - reporting of spam. Suppose you 
want everyone to have a spam-missed folder so that if a spam gets 
through then the user drags it into the spam missed folder. But instead 
of storing it there it executes a program and pipes the message into it. 
In this case a learner program for the spam filter. The folder would be 
"write only" and attempting to read the folder would generally look
like
it was empty. Setup would look like this:

executable-folder spam-missed {
  command = /usr/bin/sa-learn spam
  user = spamd
  group = spamd 
  create_folder = yes
  accounts = *
}

The "create_folder" command says to add the folder to the users lists 
whether or not it is physically there. The folder appears even if there 
is no real folder. If it is "no" then it only exists if there is a
real
folder. The "user" and "group" is of course the UID and GID
to run the
"command" as. The "accounts" determines which accounts are
affected.
Default is everyone.

Other uses is to control blacklists and whitelists. Dragging a message 
into the blacklist folder runs an executable that adds the sender to a 
blacklist, or a whitelist, or controls settings etc.

Marc Perkel wrote:
> I have a wild idea for a feature that is somewhat unusual, would be very 
> powerful, and easy to implement. What I want is ...
> 
> Special folders that when someone drags a message into them - it pipes 
> the message into a program.
> 
> The reason I want this is - for example - reporting of spam. Suppose you 
At the moment, I use the following method for my single user on my home 
mail machine: cron.

Yep, every hour I have a local user cronjob which runs a script that 
retrains Spamprobe with the messages in my spamprobe-isspam and 
spamprobe-notspam folders (Maildirs) and then moves those messages to 
either the Junk folder or the Inbox.

This may not be the best way to go about it (especially the moving of 
message files between folders) but it works for me.

However, that said, I think your idea would be very useful with one 
slight change/clarification:
> executable-folder spam-missed {
>  command = /usr/bin/sa-learn spam
>  user = spamd
>  group = spamd
For user and group I'd like to be able to specify that the owner of the 
account (in my case, my user) should be the one executing the command, 
since the Spamprobe database is local to my home directory.

Ciao,
Gordon

On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 08:19 -0700, Marc Perkel wrote:
> Special folders that when someone drags a message into them - it pipes 
> the message into a program.
Something like this:
http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/Projects/dovecot-dspam-integration
maybe?

IOW, I think you do need a real folder backing it so you can remove
false positives from it. And then, you don't need much magic in dovecot
(see the plugin code).

johannes
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