Sun email servers

The other day I found a secret hidden feature of the email server we use internally in Sun. If you log in to the email erver using the web interface, then you select one of your folders and hit the "share" button, it will give some properties of the folder. One of these properties is: "allow direct delivery".

So if I enable it, someone could send email to quenelle+somefolder@sun.com and the email would get directly deposited in ./somefolder in my imap tree. This short-circuits the need for me to add a bazillion filters to the server. (One for each alias I'm on) Instead, I could subscribe to the alias using the address of quenelle+IN/alias-name@sun.com and the mail for that alias would go in ./IN/alias-name.


So adding a new filter for each alias isn't THAT much of a problem, but I can never seem to get it just right. I could resolve it by writing my own custom scripts and uploading them to the server with ldap-write, but that's way more work than I want.

Here's my current annoyance.

My normal setup sends aliases to separate folders, using server-side filters. And email that has my name on it also goes direct to my inbox. Seems simple, right? For mail that only goes to me, it works. For email that only goes to the alias it works. What about mail that is addressed to both me and an alias? What I see coming into my inbox is two copies of a message, each one with both addresses in it (me and the alias).

The server only supports simple rules like: match X: send to Y. So I tell it to match my name and copy to my inbox. And I tell it to match the alias and copy to the alias folder. The result is that for any email to an alias and to me, I get two copies in the folder and two copies in my inbox.

My theory is that if the server directly deposits alias email into the folder, then I'll only see one copy going past my mail filters, and I'll be able to get one copy in my inbox and one copy in the folder (when I get double-addressed email)

Now I just need to find some time to play wth it.

I wish the Roller software would get a built-in editor as good as blogger.com. I have to resort to raw text now, and I'm getting very good at typeing paragraph open/close tags by hand.